


S.O.S. Ecrits Avec De L'Air

by TerresDeBrume



Series: SEADLA Verse [10]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Belief is a source of power, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Craving, Free Will, Frottage, Gen, Goddesses, Gods, Implied maiming/amputation, M/M, Magic, Mythology - Freeform, Past Mpreg, Past Torture, Self Harm, Self-Worth Issues, Semantics save lives, Shapeshifting, Suicidal Thoughts, Theology, Tony-centric, Triggers, Trust Issues, Wordcount: Over 10.000, Wordcount: Over 30.000, Wordcount: Over 50.000
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-06
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-01 13:58:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 67,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not a story about a superhero--although he tries to be one. This is, arguably, not a story about a hero, and it is definitely not a story about a billionaire-genius-playboy-philanthropist, even if he can pretend to be all of these things at once.<br/>This is a story about Tony, and how he learns that there are many ways to be happy.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Or: the one where Tony tries to commit suicide, Loki saves him, and Tony's life takes a lot of unexpected turns.</i></p><p>(This story is undergoing serious rework in order to be completed)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Empty bottle

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Untitled Fanart](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/7230) by ladynorthstar. 



> **A bit of an explanation:** So back in march 2012, I saw a fanart by ladynorthstar (linked below), and wrote the first version of this chapter on impulse, to exorcize some of my own issues. Then, because I couldn’t bear to leave things there, I started writing what followed, and SEADLA was born.
> 
> A little over a year later, after twenty chapters and overwhelming responses, I let go of the fic out of a combination of anxiety, fatigue and simply not knowing how to deal with Tony’s emotional development. I never really liked leaving things as they were, and the fact that even three years later I still occasionally get positive comments on this unfinished story kept nagging at me–I kept wanting to pick the story up and finish it, but the difference in quality grated too much for me to just get back into the original trail.
> 
> So now here I am, with SEADLA 2.0, and the firm intention to finish the story as it was started. As far as I’m concerned, I intend this to be an update in writing style more than a reworking of the story: I know there are problematic aspects with how it plays out, but I’m not here to correct them.
> 
> Still, maybe it’ll interest some of you, in which case you can look for updates on the first monday or the following 24 (ish) months. They will be published [on Tumblr](terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/tagged/seadla) first and foremost, then crossposted/updated here. As of July 4th 2016, only the first chapter has been updated, all that follows is the original version of the text.
> 
> Chapter 2 will be updated on August 1st.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony decides to commit suicide and, since he doesn’t have anything to lose, writes a letter to the one person whose opinion he doesn’t care about: Loki.

Loki

  
  


Writing to you of all people is probably not my brightest idea but then again, it’s also probably not the worst, so there’s that. ~~‘Sides, you could probably argue that the whole~~ ~~suicide~~ ~~business is stupid but it’s not like it matters at this point~~

  
  


I’m kind of too tired to pretend right now, but then I’ve been doing it for so long I just don’t think I can let go of it even now but you—well, you don’t like me in the first place, so it’s okay.

Truth is, I’ve got the others well fooled. Even your brother thinks I’m a good guy, which is laughable really. I tried though, to be one. To be…I don’t know, a hero, I guess. A decent person, a decent friend, but I’m not. I just kind of pretend and it works, somehow.

  
  


Fact is, though, that I’m an uncaring asshole who basically just hurts people I’m supposed to help and I’ll never, ever be the guy I should be—which of course the others don’t see because if they did they wouldn’t bother with me anymore.

It’s tiring though. Being 95% bullshit. You can’t open up to people about it—the mess they see is enough to drive most of them away, what would they do about the mess under the lid? They’d leave, that’s what.

And anyway, how do I even compete there? It’s a losing battle. I mean I’m friends with Thor for Christ’s sake! I’m friends with Steve Fucking Rogers how do you even begin to be worthy of that? I know I never was. I’ll never be.

  
  


I’ve tried, it’s true. I’ve lied and bullshitted my way into the company of good people somehow, and so far the only thing preventing them from seeing through it is a fancy, multi-million dollars toy that looks good in pictures and makes me feels vaguely better about myself for the fives minutes it takes to fly to your latest theater of operations, before I start playing the annoying fly part while others do the real work—and that’s when I don’t make things worse!

  
  


I’m tired. I keep screwing up even the simplest task and letting people down because I have the emotional intelligence of a doombot. It doesn’t matter how much I try, I still fail, I still never manage to—I don’t know. Make good. Be good. Whichever, really.

I mean, look at me, I’m a billionaire, I have friends who can literally move mountains and are arguably the coolest persons on the planets and what do I do? Decide to kick the bucket and write my last words to the guy I’m supposed to beat down every other day of the week. Not that I succeed much at that either though.

  
  


I guess I’m just tired of having to work on…I don’t know. Everything, really. I look around me and people just seem to have it together—being happy’s natural to them. They just smile and have it and I—I’ve got everything and all I can do is whine and cry and generally just feeling miserable and I hate it. I hate that I can’t do this, that I can’t feel…normal. Good. Even just 'alright’ would do but I can’t and I feel like a whiny piece of shit and instead of getting off my ass and doing something to change it—instead of making myself feel better—I just spend time whining more and crying more and honestly, how do you not hate someone like that?

It shouldn’t be that hard. To…I don’t know, have friends and be sincere and smile and have a life—Steve does it all the time. Thor does it all the time. Rhodey, Pepper, hell, even Bruce and Nat manage it, but I don’t and I can’t and I just hate that I can’t make myself do that. More and more, every day.

  
  


The truth is I have no idea how to make it better. It’s not even like there aren’t goo moments—sometimes I feel good. Great, even.

But then there’s going to be a party or whatever and I’ll be stuck between making an ass out of myself or watching people make small talk and smile and make friends and I’ll end up getting drunk off my ass feeling like I don’t belong, like I’m ruining the party just for being there…and at the end of the night people just give me that fucking look, the one where they wonder what they’re gonna do about me, why the hell they still invite me (it’s the money) why the hell I even bother coming.

I…probably shouldn’t care, but I can’t. I should just be…okay, I guess. Just have fun and not give a crap what others think about me but no matter how much I fake it I never seem to make it and hell, wouldn’t it be nice for once, to have something and not destroy it in the most spectacular way possible?

  
  


It occurs to me you’re probably doing the exact same face they’d do. I doubt you know how all of that feels, what with the magic powers and divineness and all. I doubt a guy like you ever stood next to a friend—or a colleague, or a fellow crazy dictator, whichever—and felt like you’d be kicked out the very second they looked past the pretense and saw you for who you really were. Of felt jealous of the people you liked for going on with their life and for it to look so simple to them, so fucking easy when even the simplest tasks feel so enormous to you and, and then hate yourself a little more every day for being jealous when they didn’t deserve it.

I highly doubt you ever felt so bad it hurt, but so terrified of talking to anyone that you end up sitting alone in a room and just cry for hours.

  
  


So bad, you almost wish you we diagnosed with some kind of depression or sickness or something so you know it’s not your fucking fault you’re a screw up.

But that’s how I feel most of the time.

When I’m alone, or I’ve screwed something up again, or when I see people smiling in the streets or we come home from keeping you in check and the best thing I’ve done is play bait—and honestly how pathetic is that?

  
  


I’m just tired.

Tired of feeling like happiness is some kind of duty I can’t fulfill, of people not getting it, telling me to be more open when I’m already trying and can’ do it. I’m tired of telling myself to quit whining and then keeping on doing exactly that and never daring to do or say anything about it. Of fucking up every relationship I ever had because I know they’re doomed anyway.

It’s no life.

At least, no life I want to live.

I’d ask you to tell the others I’m sorry, but the truth is you’re probably not the one who’s going to read this anyway.

  
  


Well, it’s not like it’s going to matter much now. And anyway, I’m just too tired to care.


	2. Reaching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony wakes up and receives unexpected help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Edit August 1st 2016:** This is the reworked, brand-new-and-updated version of the chapter!  
>  It hasn't deviated too much from the original, except in this one I remember poor Rhodey exists, which is a good thing. Like I said, I'm not here to fix all the problematic aspects of this fic, but I'm still glad I can spot them now, as I rewrite it. Yay for progress! :D

At first it almost feels like he fell asleep in the middle of an _ER_ marathon—there's the heart monitor beeping and quiet shuffling further to his left, the pungent smell of obsessively clean spaces and antiseptics, and the barely-there weight of perfusion tubes tugging at his skin when he moves his wrists...the light from the monitors make him close his eyes almost as soon as he opens them up.

Tony takes a deep breath in and, with far more caution than such a simple thing should require, opens his eyes again to the faint green glow of a light blinking in darkness. Every inch of him hurts, heavy and slow like a lazy morning, and the bed under him doesn't feel quite that stable. He can hear just fine, though, and doesn't miss the quiet voice on his left when it says:

 

“I was beginning to think you would never wake up.”

 

The tone tickles at Tony's memory, the familiarity of it wrapped in the wrong voice, and by the time he finally grasps the message his eyes have gotten used to the dark enough that he can make a silhouette out against the wall.

He squints at it, head pounding as he tries to figure out what's going on. God, he's stiff as a board, and not in the fun way. Doesn't remember any sex happening recently though, or a fight for that matter. Surprisingly similar effects. Anyway. No cause for hurting except—

 

It's the touch of a finger at the edge of bandages that put it all together, and Tony tenses.

 

He was, indeed, alone in the tower yesterday. Or whenever he was last conscious, really—he's pretty sure he'd feel different if it was that recent.

And okay, he was kind of drunk. That doesn't help with rational thinking.

Still. Pretty sure he was alone. At least on his floor. There was Pepper for a while, but he sent her home early so she could go back to Happy and their domestic life-that-works-better-without-Tony-in-it and then...yeah.

The downward spiral.

More booze.

The razor.

 

_Ugh._

 

Tony flexes his fingers—ignores the sting of stitches stretching under the gauze—and the fingers on his arm take off and away from him.

He's careful to keep his eyes off whoever it is as he says:

 

“Didn't think I would.”

 

It's too late, he knows, but at this point there's nothing much he can do but stare in the dark above him and swallow the lump in his throat.

 

“So I gathered. You were fairly upfront about that in your letter.”

 

Tony's brain, still stuck in the cushiony dullness of whatever it is he was given to stay asleep, takes entirely too long to put two and two together—the annoyance at that feels distant. Detached. Like knowing he should be bothered but being incapable of actually managing the sentiment.

 

“Loki?”

“Vicky, for now.”

 

Tony frowns at that, turns his head toward the visitor as a dim golden glow blossoms in a thin and impeccably manicured hand.

The movement unleashes a small tsunami in Tony's head and he has to close his eyes until it calms down, but eventually he manages to catch sight of “Vicky”. She's...pretty much the archetypal bimbo. Thin, white, blonde, with skin-tight clothes and large breasts. She could have been pulled off the pages of a tabloid if it weren't for the vivid, poison-green eyes. Tony squints at her—him? He's not sure—and the way her hand glows with what must be magic.

Somewhere, at the back of his brain, Tony wonders if maybe he's still in the tower, delirious with blood loss—he's not sure that's one of the symptoms, but it's probably more plausible than having the god of mischief sitting at his bedside table.

(The way his wrists keep throbbing, though, tends to weigh in favor of this whole circus being real, but still. Loki is sitting at his bedside table.)

 

“I may have failed to enlighten your doctors when they assumed you and I had sexual intercourse prior to your lapse in judgment. I believe it would be in both our interests if you played along.”

 

Tony manages the tiniest nod before his head starts hurting again and he has to close his eyes.

In all honesty, he's still not completely sure what's going on, but he's still grasping at the most basic concepts and, frankly, probably exerting more effort than he should right now. It must show on his face, too, because Loki says:

 

“I'm a very convincing liar.”

 

The face really is all wrong, but the expression is a perfect—if less manic—replica of what Tony remembers. If at all possible, it makes everything feel more surreal.

 

“How long?”

“About forty-eight hours. Self-Righteousness Incarnate and that captain of yours visited you earlier.”

 

It takes several seconds for Tony to realize Loki meant Thor and Steve—they have, after all, been working together for a couple of months by now, and even if they're having some trouble making the whole friendship thing work, it's not how Tony usually thinks of his colleagues anymore.

He's too tired for the spark of amusement blooming in his chest to blossom into a smile, but it's pleasant knowing it's there anyway.

 

“How was it?”

“I don't think they like Vicky very much. The others I haven't seen, and considering I don't have a private way of contacting them I figured I would leave it to your other visitors to inform them.”

 

Tony manages to blink in acknowledgement, and sighs in relief when the light vanishes from Loki's hand, leaving them blessedly blind.

Loki didn't mention Pepper.

Rhodey, of course, is out with the army on a mission so secret even Tony didn't manage to get his location before he left...but Pepper is in New York. True, she has a life outside of the Avengers—of him—but still, it's—Tony swallows and blinks against an abrupt influx of tears, and if Loki—Vicky—notices, she doesn't comment on it.

Silence stretches over the room, lulls Tony's eyes into closing over the emptiness of his chest and the thick cotton of his mind. Most likely, he falls asleep at some point—if nothing else, it feels like no time at all from then until Tony's eyes snap open again, mind caught on a question he probably should have asked sooner.

 

He claws his way back to awareness—it takes too long, it's sluggish and everything smells and feels wrong—and manages to croak out a feeble “why”.

At first, silence is his only response and he thinks, maybe, Loki—Vicky—he really is too tired to figure this thing out—is gone until the god's real voice answers:

 

“Because you assume too much about people.”

 

Tony can't manage anything beyond a confused grunt.

 

“You presumed I couldn't possibly understand what went on in your head, Stark,” Loki says, and Tony may remember something along those lines.

 

Or not.

It's blurry.

 

“You forgot who I grew up with. Who I had to measure up to.”

 

A pause.

 

“Asgard, too, has its comedians.”

 

Tony has to chew on that for a moment, and not just because of the fatigue—though it certainly doesn't help.

 

It all seems so...impossible.

Loki, who once tried to invade Earth with his ego and not much else, who is one of the most feared criminals of the planet—whose havoc-wreaking activities have contributed to an economic boom the likes of which America hasn't seen in decades and what may well be the resurrection of paganism in the States, Loki, who is quite literally a God has...insecurities?

Everyone knows Loki has issues—Tony better than most. There's probably more crazy in his pinky than in Tony's entire brain, but _this_?

 

This crippling feeling of worthlessness, this bone-deep conviction that nothing you say, to or are will ever be enough to make you worthy of anyone's attention—that no matter what kind of affection you receive it'll always be borrowed, stolen, or scammed out of others?

Honestly, it's not like anyone can blame Tony for trying to stare at Loki through the darkness of the room.

 

“I'm hallucination, aren't I?”

 

There's a tense silence during which Tony strongly considers trying to apologize, the instinct faster than any coherent thought his brain can manage at any given time.

 

“As I said,” Loki/Vicky says, tone ice-cold, “You presume too much about people. You may not believe it but I do know what it is to be...different.”

 

It's the ellipsis that does it.

Tony's heard them in Thor's mouth every time he tried to discuss his brother—heard the silence that said Thor couldn't find the words to encompass the places where the brothers' histories run parallel but never encounter.

It's always been so easy to fill them in, too.

Tony wasn't there to witness any of it, that's true, but he knows what it means when people say someone is “...different” or “...complicated” or “...difficult”, knows the weight of those three fucking dots that say so much more than the word they precede.

Those three stupid dots cover entire lifetimes of “I don't get you” and “why aren't you more like me?” and “why won't you act the way you should?”

 

There are eternities in those pauses, things unsaid and pains unhealed, and the weight of them presses against Tony's chest as he tries to work through the lump in his throat—swallows hard against the welling of tears in his eyes and draws a shaky breath in.

 

“Actually,” he says, watery lines of water cooling down on his temples, “I think I do believe you.”

 

He knows there's no real use looking at Loki now—even if he could really see his face, it'd look all wrong anyway—but he can't help trying to catch the god's eyes, establish some kind of connection, maybe, like a reassurance that there is at least one person on this shitty planet who really gets what it's like to live in Tony's head.

He gets nothing but a rustle of clothes and the vague sense that Loki moved, sensing the move without being able to see it properly. Maybe he should say something at that point—like 'thank you' or 'thanks for saving my life', which he isn't sure he'd mean but at least it'd be somewhat polite, or maybe even just 'thank you for sharing', though he doubts that one would really be appreciated.

 

In the end, he doesn't get to say anything: the rattle of a chariot pushed along the corridor fills the room and breaks the moment—easy as a bubble—and, in a flash of green light, Loki's gone.

 

 

In the morning, after the nurses made sure everything was going as fine as it could be and the doctors gave Tony a long talk about his vitals and his possibilities once out of the hospital, after Pepper and Bruce and Nat and the rest of the Avengers have come to do their dance of shuffling feet and barely restrained questions—after, even, the army sent a message from Rhodey that only contains the words “don't you dare” in capital letters and must have required insane amount of determination to be sent—Tony doesn't have much left to do but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

(He could, technically, watch TV, but that would require moving to get the remote. He doesn't have the strength, so he just lies there and tries not to think about the ache in his wrist, the tiredness gnawing at his bones or, really, anything at all.)

 

He's trying to figure out how to explain his gesture while thinking about it as little as humanly possible—mostly just succeeding in wishing for a drink—when something vibrates under the covers.

It takes some shuffling and the alien feel of stitches pulling against his skin for far too long before he manages to retrieve his phone—which, he's fairly sure, isn't supposed to be there—and read the text displayed on the screen.

 

 **Unknown number:** I figured if you didn't die, it might mean there's hope for me yet -L.L.


	3. Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony has to see a therapist, and gets abducted afterwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter edited/reworked on Sept. 5 2016.

They make him see a therapist when he gets out.

 

He tries very hard not to blame them—at this point it’s probably either that or suicide via cirrhosis and he supposes it’s understandable of that they’d rather avoid that. He’s not too keen on it himself, anyway. Well, he still sort of thinks about it but not to actually do it, more as a failsafe. Activate in case of impending, unavoidable doom. Possibly, in the others’ position, he’d do the same.

The rather large problem is: thinking like this doesn’t make anything better. He’s still trapped between spilling his guts to a complete stranger when, historically, it hasn’t been such a great move for him...or spilling his guts to Rhodey and have to admit, a) that he lied during their Skype call last weekend when he said doing better already (thank the universe for crappy hospital Wi-Fi) and b) that he’s kinda-sorta been lying by omission for years by not telling his own best friend about his ridiculously disproportionate problems. Between the rock and the hard place, Tony would rather pick the rock, but that doesn’t make the blow any softer.

 

The—possibly only—upside to that, at least, is that once he’s done fighting Steve and Pepper for a modicum of privacy and telling them he didn’t plan on jumping in front of the first passing car to shut them up, the walk to his therapist’s office turns out to be a good thing. Sure, it requires conscious effort not to beat himself up about the low blow he used during their conversation, but once he’s pushed that out of his mind, Tony gets a solid fifteen minutes of blessed emptiness. Fifteen minutes where he gets to focus on the rhythm of his feet and forget about Pepper’s fear and Steve’s vaguely judgmental confusion and Bruce’s guilt and Thor’s...whatever it is that makes him look at Tony like he’s turned into a particularly nasty jigsaw puzzle.

It’s not that Tony doesn’t understand why they react the way they do—even if it does take several deep breathing exercises and at least ten minutes of alone-time before he can clearly remember that—but the _way_ they do it is downright insufferable. The way they keep looking and pausing and holding their breath—the way even _Jarvis_ , of all people, has taken to asking him about his state of mind more often than usual! He could just about scream with the ache of it, with the way his skin keeps crawling with the need to go down to his workshop and never get back out.

At least walking to therapy alone affords him some time away from the excess of it all and the permanent, stifling undercurrent of confused disappointment, as if gratefulness and cooperation were the only possible paths and he’s just being difficult by ignoring them.

 

It’s not like he’s not trying. Half of his time these days—well, for the past forty odd years, really—are spent trying to feel the way he should, if only so it’ll make things easier for him and everyone el _s_ e involved. Much as it was during the l _a_ st four decades, though, the results of that switch between nothing and the mental equivalent of his brain waving a middle finger at his face. Except on top of it all, now tony has to deal with Steve’s awkward verbal reiterations that he does genuinely enjoy spending time with Tony, who isn’t a burden at all and blah, blah, blah.

(There is, in all honesty, something briefly soothing about that or, at the very least, in the thought that Steve cares enough about Tony to think of saying it. It’s just that Tony’s brain is screwed in a way that makes Steve’s attempt as efficient as putting a band-aid on a bleeding artery and, right now, he doesn’t feel up to indulging anyone’s ego about the efficiency of their efforts.)

 

He arrives at his appointment twenty minutes early and spends most of those getting up then back down—crossing and uncrossing his legs, fiddlings with the hem of his jacket—before he ends up taking his phone out, typing a text and hitting send before his brain can fully catch up with him.

 **Tony:** 1st therapy appointment soon. thinking i might skip 

He’s a tad disappointed—but hardly surprised—when his appointment time rolls around without an answer and he turns his phone off. He hasn’t done that in literal years, and it’s quite possible that he shouldn’t feel so viciously satisfied, knowing his friends have no means of contacting him right now, but he does. After all, even a little control is better than no control at all.

 

Tony’s finely-honed experience in going through the motions and pretending to listen comes in handy as his therapist sorts out the last administrative details and drones on about their usual working methods. It gives Tony time to focus on what he’s going to say later on, scratch his wrists, look at the walls, the window, the strange painting hung on the wall—and stare like a gap-mouthed fish once the formalities are over and he’s actually expected to talk.

Because while the first standard part has been a complete success—he literally didn’t even catch the guy’s name—this entire situation is miles away from Tony’s usual scripts and now, he’s got no idea what to talk about.

 

Well, that’s not all true. He’s probably supposed to explain why he decided to cut his wrist open—retrace the mental steps that brought him there. The question being, of course: how do you even explain any of it? Which angle of the all-around pathetic mess do you tackle first?

“ _I worry my friends don’t love me like I love them.”_ But is it really love if you feel like you need them? And isn’t it much better for them if the _y don_ ’t need you?

“ _My father never really gave a shit about me.”_ _But really, how pathetic does that sound, at his age and with a father almost twenty years dead?_

 _“Sometimes, people ask me how I’m going and I want_ _to cry.”_ _But really that one is probably just him being i_ nadequate—everyone else seems to have at least that much under control, and besides it’s really kind of a minor thing anyway.

 _“I'm jealous of my ex because she's moving on with her life and I'm still stuck in this freaking place where I can't do anything that doesn't sound like I'm a teenager on crack or a depressed guy who drinks too much.”_ _That one almost tears a snort out of Tony._

 _“I_ am _a depressed guy who drinks too much.”_

 

There’s no real starting point, no blueprint or lesson plan he can follow to point at his life and say ‘this is where it all started to go down’. There’s just him and his stupid ass sitting in an office he didn’t even particularly want to be in in the first place—Tony swallows hard against the abrupt burn in his throat and does everything he can not to watch his therapist—Colin? Justin?—a a second longer than strictly necessary.

 

“Do you want me to ask the obvious question?” Maybe-Bradin asks eventually. “It usually helps.”

 

Honestly, Tony has been bombarded by the thousand dollars question—on Pepper’s face and in Steve’s voice and in Rhodey’s silence before he said ‘I’m glad you’re alive’ and apologized for being in deployment for the fifth time—enough to last him a lifetime or ten already. Hell, he’s even physically felt it, in the oddly delicate pat of Thor’s hand on his shoulder when he greeted Tony back home. The very thought of having to deal with that question again is enough to make him crave for a good bottle of Jack and a quiet place to lie in for eternity.

He did promise to talk to the guy though—and anyway, he’s not the expert and if it’s what he’s asked to do in order to properly complete therapy duty, he’s just gonna have to bite the bullet—so he nods, and tires not to wince when the guy says:

 

“I am aware I’m not the first to ask you this, and I suppose you’ve given it some thought of your own already. However, I’d like you to answer me without thinking. Is that alright with you?”

 

Tony nods at maybe-Austin’s Italian leather shoes and braces himself for the obvious by knitting the fingers of his hands together.

 

“Do you have any idea why you tried to die, Tony?”

“I overcooked the rice.”

 

Which is, he supposes, a stupid thing to beat himself over, let alone attempt suicide for—he can even feel his neck burn with the shame of it. But, of course, it’s not just about the rice.

It’s just that someone that night left and jokingly told him not to starve which, really, is a valid concern in the absence of people capable of forcibly shoving food in his hands. But he was drunk and he was vexed and he decided he’d prove himself—and them—he could take care of himself like a normal, responsible adult—for once—and honestly, Steve and Thor got the hang of it pretty fast so why the Hell wouldn’t Tony, uh?

But then he let it overcook, and it became another tally on the long list of things he failed at like being interesting enough for Howard and making Pepper happy and meeting basic adulting standards and—well _._

 _At_ the time it kind of seemed like the logical conclusion to a life-long thoughts process, but now Tony’s facing the consequences of it and he’s having doubts. The rice thing gets him starting though and he’s not quite sure what he says after that—it kind of all mixes together in an ugly blur and there’s a lot of nose-blowing involved—but he comes out of the office feeling so much lighter than before he almost feels like he’s going to topple over.

It’s possibly not the intended effect, but it’s progress and, honestly, he might as well take it.

 

He steps on the sidewalk feeling like he’s breathing a different kind of air somehow, and blinks when a woman walks up to him, white skin almost glowing in the sun. She’s decked out in full walking gear, fire-like hair arranged in a messy French braid while her face disappears behind garish yellow sunglasses that make her look like a large, cheerfully-dressed bug.

Tony reaches for his public face, the polite-but-not-engaging smile he keeps for press mobs and women he’s trying to refuse a hook up with while also avoiding a scandal. He’s not all that good at that last one, but in this specific case it doesn’t really matter because the woman looks ready for an actual conversation, which means Tony has few chances of avoiding it and really, what did he think coming there on foot that was stupid he should have—she smirks, stretching the freckles splattered on her cheeks, and Tony’s eyes widen.

 

“Don’t look so scared, Stark,” she says as she takes her glasses off and reveal eyes just as green as they were in Vicky’s face, “I’m not here to harm you.”

 

“I...didn’t expect you to be here,” Tony says after too long a beat.

 

He definitely feels far less surprised than he should, let alone scared. It’s a bit like he’s exhausted his emotional quota of the day and there’s nothing left to shock him until tomorrow morning. Loki doesn’t seem to care though, and he/she keeps smiling as she loops an arm around Tony’s:

 

“I came here to abduct you.”

“Should I page the Avengers?”

“That depends—do you want to skip your celebration?”

 

Tony manages-barely—not to gape at Loki as his/her freckled shoulder rises and falls with a shrug. A couple weeks ago, he thought finding Loki by his bedside after waking from a heavily sedated sleep would be the weirdest thing to ever happen in his life—and now for some reason here Loki is again, looking for all intent and purposes like he/she planned a mountain hike and talking about celebrating something with Tony. Possibly even _for_ him.

Error 404, does not compute.

After all, leaving aside the fact that Tony hasn’t had a private celebration for anything since he got into MIT—even if Rhodey was the only person he really cared about at the time—he’s never really managed to make time to spend with his closest friends. The thought of having some kind of tête-à-tête with Loki, of all people, is almost enough to make him turn heels and tell himself he just hallucinated all the way back to the tower.

(He doesn’t, of course. Loki might be the local supervillain but spending time with him/her, pesky slash problems aside, sounds infinitely preferable to going back home and facing a barrage of well-meaning but definitely not welcome questions about his therapy session. The slash problem is much easier to solve.)

 

“Should I use he or she?” He blurts before he can grow self-conscious about it, “Because I’m kind of confused and having to dance around it is annoying.”

“Whichever you prefer,” Loki responds with a stunning lack of helpfulness. “Although since I am currently presenting as a woman, I suppose feminine pronouns are the most logical option.”

 

Tony nods, mostly because there isn’t really anything to add to that, and follows Loki off the street and into an empty alley, away from the mid-afternoon crowd. It’s a good thing he’s pulling all the survival instincts off service these days, because it looks like the kind of decor Hollywood characters get murdered in...again though: post-therapy cross-interrogation. Not looking forward to that.

He doesn’t protest when blinding green light surrounds Loki and him, only to reveal a wall of tropical trees and a thin trail when it fades away. Looking down at himself, he’s only distantly surprised to find hiking short and shoes have replaced his pressed jeans, a long-sleeved linen shirt hiding his wrists from the general view. In for an abduction, in for a clothes change, or something like that.

He lets Loki guide him into the woods, the smell of green covering everything else, and doesn’t think to ask where they are until they’ve been walking for a good fifteen or twenty minutes.

 

“We’re going to the Carbet Falls,” Loki says with surprisingly low levels of cultivated disinterest. “We’re in Guadeloupe.”

 

Tony nods, even though the name doesn’t ring even the smallest bell—he’s an engineer, not a cartographer, and there’s a reason he gave Jarvis full GPS capacities—and saves his breath for the trek ahead.

Two hours, one nearly-swallowed spider and a soaked sock later, Tony slips-limbs-waddles across the steep last leg of the trail—nearly faceplants into the mud, too—and hoists himself onto a sort of plateau among the trees, only to bend over in pain as he desperately tries to catch his breath.

 

“This is ridiculous,” he manages between two painful gasps, “I think I’m dying.”

“If you can complain about it,” Loki says without missing a beat, “You’re probably not in grave danger.”

 

Tony manages a frustrated glare in her direction while his body does an excellent impression of being stabbed in the ribs. Far better, in fact, than it should be. Okay, sure, maybe going on a hike so soon after losing a significant amount of blood wasn’t the best idea but he’s freaking Iron Man, dammit! Just because he doesn’t run every morning like Steve does shouldn’t negate the effort of flying the suit around. And in any case, how dare his body give out on him? It’s supposed to do what Tony wants it to, not take over operations.

Stupid hardware, never quite works the way it’s supposed to.

 

“Do you require a bucket?”

 

He manages to push a peeved grunt out, which kind of furthers Loki’s point—it does sound like Tony’s about to retch—but in the end Tony takes a few more deep breaths and braces himself against his knees so he can take a better look at the scenery.

In front of him, a beach of large rocks surrounds the greenest water he’s ever seen. Small waves ripple against the shore, and when Tony follows their path he’s not surprised to find a white, foam mess of water mixing into a larger set—upward, the fall stretches into a white ribbon over a hundred yards high, stretching over one rocky outcrop after the other and sprinkling at least two rainbows over the myriads of green on either side. The whole thing looks almost painfully lush, and it takes Tony a moment to realize he’s gaping.

He’s never seen a real waterfall before.

Well, he did technically see the Niagara, once, but he was on a business trip and too drunk to remember anything beyond a life-encompassing need to empty his bladder as soon as humanly possible. Not exactly a big souvenir. Besides, differences in scale aside, he didn’t have to put effort into seeing the Niagara and, at the time, he held himself up a lot better than he does these days...so maybe that plays a role in Tony’s sudden surge of emotion—maybe he just needs to sleep more—but his throat kind of closes up either way.

Alright, sure, it won’t turn him into a tree-hugger. It’s a waterfall, not a miracle. It’s still enough to make him forget about his current problems—the constant thrum of moving water providing an excellent sound-shield against his usual train of thoughts—and, like many things these days, tony feels ready to cling to it for as long and hard as he can possibly manage.

Doesn’t stop him from being a sarcastic bastard, though.

 

“Well,” he says, failing to sound entirely unimpressed, “It sure is a lot of water falling on rocks.”

“Well yes,” Loki says as green light solidifies into a complimentary basket, “What’s the point of having magic if I can’t get you a pool, a girl and a good meal?”

 

Tony snorts. The description certainly does sound a lot like what he’s used to—but somewhere in the process Loki decided to give it a sharp spin. The food, for one, looks far too ordinary and—or—healthy to be part of Tony’s usual diet. There are pastries there he hasn’t seen since his last European vacations and several others that look like they’ve originated even further east—the fruits are far pinker than usual, and although they make Tony’s mouth water he’s fairly sure he couldn’t name most of them to save his life. Loki’s current body doesn’t quite meet the usual beauty standards—she looks _pretty_ but not the kind of Hollywood pretty Tony usually does this kind of things with—and of course the setting is literal miles away from Tony’s usual pools.

It’s like being in a jacuzzi with champagne and a girl, except not. Like his life, but not quite.

It’s certainly not something Tony would have thought of trying on his own, and honestly probably not something he’d be comfortable doing on the regular—hot tubs may be artificial but they usually fulfill their purposes very professionally—but it’s an interesting departure from his usual regardless and, if Tony’s being honest, it’s also full of possibilities.

***

When he gets back to the tower about four hours later—heart jackhammering with guilt when he realizes exactly how long he’s spent outside—there are twenty-five texts and almost as many missed calls. He spares a short, guilt-filled elevator ride hoping the ground will open up and swallow him and, when it proves vain, does his best to shuffle through the Talks planted in his way.

(Pepper’s, worry restrained behind professional calm and ‘I’m not mad, I’m worried’ like Tony is a recalcitrant toddler; Steve’s, hurried and peeved; and Bruce’s, trying to get it but not quite succeeding; then Thor and Nat and Clint and by the time Jarvis tries to ask if he needs anything, Tony barely has enough restraint left to stop himself at an angry ‘no’ before he locks himself in his workshop and tries to bite the tears back.)  


**Unknown number:** Doom ransacked my hq while we were gone. Expect his latest plans to arrive soon. -L.L.

  
  
Tony hasn’t had the energy for a proper smile in weeks—maybe even months—but he almost wants to.

 

It’s close enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who won't/can't comment here on AO3, I'd be delighted to hear what you think about it, so if you could go to my blog and [leave an anonymous comment](http://terresdebrume.tumblr.com/ask) (or a signed one, I like those as well) it would mean a lot to me.  
> Please, don't be affraid to give me feedback on this fic :)
> 
> Also, if you want to have additionnal infos about the fic, such as when I'm writing on it, what inspired me, what I was listening to while writing etc, you can go have a look at [this fic's tag on my blog](http://terresdebrume.tumblr.com/tagged/Fic%3A-SOS-Ecrits-Avec-De-L%27Air).


	4. Blades

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony almost literally sits on the doorstep to another world, and plays barbershop with Thor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter reworked on October 3rd 2016.

They—and by ‘they’ Tony is pretty sure he means Pepper, Steve, and the rest of the team either mumbling assent or not protesting—took all the knives out of the kitchen.

They also took the decorative swords off his bedroom wall and replaced his straight razor with an electrical one that’s impossible to maintain his usual goatee with—and even if it could, it wouldn’t be worth the major headaches he gets from the buzz of it. He thinks, idly, that the others may be taking his growing beard as a sign things he’s not getting better which, in all honesty, is only half wrong—he’s not doing that much better, but the facial hair isn’t the emo externalization method they think it is.

Rhodey called last week, worry poured in the patchy tones of his voice, and ended up spending most of his time reminding Tony that all of this is happening  because people are worried. Because they _care_. That Tony should try to understand.

  


(Tony almost hung up. Swallowed the rock in his throat. Smiled, said ‘you’re right’. Didn’t miss the new shade of worry in Rhodey’s voice when he said ‘take care’ just before they finished the call.)

  


Thing is, Tony does understand. He _understands_ , that the others are worried, that they’re probably convinced they’re doing him a favor. He _understands_ that Rhodey can’t possibly ditch his army buddies in the middle of an operation so hushed it took Pepper five days just to get him on the phone—and no video feed allowed. Tony _understands_ all of that, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t resent his friends for it. Most of the time. What he feels though, doesn’t give a fucking damn about rationality or understanding, and he still wishes Rhodey were here with him—wishes he’d wake up to his best friend ready to step into a sleep-addled chat at ass o’clock in the morning just because Tony’s a fucked up _mess_ who hasn’t had anything resembling a sleeping pattern in year.

And hell, he even _understands_ why the sharp things are kept away from him—possibly would have done the same thing if anyone he knew ended up in his current position but fuck, does the thought of it make his skin crawl. As if the constant, worried pressure of eyes on him at all time wasn’t enough, now he’s got vaguely knife-shaped pieces of plastic shit to remind him of what he’s done. Forty-two (so the packet said, but some of them broke already) reminders that people who used to trust him and rely on him are now waiting for and dreading the day he fucks up again and they’ll have to ban something else out of the tower.

(Tony bets alcohol. It’s a miracle they haven’t seized the occasion to make him stop already, but maybe they’re just too busy worrying about knives.)

  


Last month, he cut his wrist open.

Two weeks ago, he started therapy.

Most of the time, it’s the scars that feel like the biggest change—that, and Thor’s oddly quiet voice as he offered to shave Tony himself if he’d rather not go to a barber. It…seems like it’s a genuine offer rather than something tossed out to make Tony feel better but. Well. What on earth? Maybe it’s an Asgardian thing? He’s not sure how to take it.

Besides, thinking about Thor tends to make him think about Loki these days, and that’s—it’s not a bad thing per se. But it’s not like he’s talked to anyone about him either.

  


Firstly because talking about Loki would mean, at best, a long lecture on precedents and smart decisions and who knows what else and his goddamn decisions make sense, okay? A weird sense. A broken sense, maybe, but they make sense. It makes sense to talk to the guys who saved your life. And it makes sense to keep talking to someone who sends you ridiculous parodies and links or hamster-like voices covering pop songs, when those are the things that keep you going.

You just don’t throw something like that out of the window because of pesky things like supervillainy.

And besides, even if Loki were an ordinary guy, he wouldn’t tell the others about him. They’d share a Look and have a Talk about it and then they’d discuss the merit of the idea—weigh in on whether that relationship is good for Tony, all the while waiting for things to go wrong again like there’s no other possible outcome. They don’t understand, of course, that sometimes it’s good to have someone whose first reaction when you’re feeling low isn’t to either panic or advise him to get better but just fucking _listen_. It comes from a good place, Tony knows, but it’s also useless and at this point just hearing ‘have you’ or ‘maybe you should’ come out of his friends’ mouth is enough to send him straight to his workshop where he can drown even the phantoms of unwanted advice.

(Sometimes, when Steve earns yet another gold star on the scale of human worthiness, he texts Loki about it and their trade petty complaints about their respective lives until one r the other finds something else to do and stops to respond. It works, for the most part. Tony’s never been quite that obsessed with keeping his batteries charged before.)

  


Occasionally, there are slip ups.

 **Tony:** Thor is acting weird.

 **Unknown number:** I'm going to need you to be more specific here. -L.L.

Okay, this one is mostly on Tony—there is, after all, publicly and catastrophically bad history between Loki and his brother. On the other hand, Thor has been doing the emotional equivalent of a clam impression for the past few days and while Clint or Nat or Bruce _might_ figure out what’s going on, just the thought of them letting the conversation come back to Steve or Pepper’s ears is enough to keep Tony’s mouth shut about it. It’s not fair to those who want to help him, maybe. He can’t really make himself care.

(Plus, he’s still alive. The blunder can’t have hurt that bad. Right?)

 **Tony:** he offered to shave me

 **Unknown number:** The offer is genuine. I understand mutual shaving is a bonding ritual among Asgardian males.

Tony stares at the text for longer than is entirely warranted, trying to figure out what exactly feels off about it but to no avail. A line of code, well, he can fix it in a matter of seconds, but people are a whole different kettle and people like Loki, well…maybe there’s a reason they’ve been getting along so far.

  


(Possibly, the seamlessness of things up until now makes this worse. The first hitch in an otherwise okay relationship maybe seems bigger, especially given that Tony actually likes what he has with Loki. And to be frank, the next text doesn’t help matter much.)

 

 **Unknown number:** Perhaps I should impress that I was discussing platonic bonding before you descend into some form of panic.

 

Tony purposefully uncurls his fingers from around the phone, not quite sure if it’s the plastic or his knuckles he hears cracking. Does he really seem like that? Like he’d panic over something that small? Sure, he got a little blindsided there and the proposition _is_ kind of awkward because he rarely talks to Thor when he’s sober and even then, not that much, but it’s not like he’s got a—a _problem_ with being close to the guy! It’s just. Awkward.

But it’s not a problem.

  


He nearly argues with Steve and Pepper over walking to therapy and no, really, guys, I don’t need someone to babysit me on the way. On the one hand, having to set up the rules—no, he won’t be walked there, no he won’t do anything stupid after, no he’s not gonna promise to answer his phone after—and deal with his friends’ “what are we going to do with you” and “why won’t you let us do what’s good for you” has the merit of taking his mind off Thor and Loki’s ridiculous assumption. On the other hand, power-walking to his therapist’ office while rushing through _Metallica_ lyrics so he won’t have time to wonder if Rhodey would look at him like that too really wasn’t part of his plan for today.

And let’s be honest here, there’s probably something deeply fucked up about resenting people for wanting to help him but the truth is, if being helped means surrendering the right to go wherever he damn pleases—if it means giving up on the chance of another ‘kidnapping’–then crazy as that may be he’s not interested in getting help just now. And fuck, how do you explain that to people? Even leaving the supervillain problem aside, there’s no way he can have a calm and collected conversation about this with anyone right now. So he nods and stays silent when he can and rushes out of the door calling Steve ‘Cap’ when he can’t, and he doesn’t let himself think too hard before he sends his next text.

Then, because it’d be a pity to let the moment pass:

 

 **Tony:** if I wake up in bed with your brother, I'm blaming you

 

Therapy goes…well, like therapy, he supposes.

He falls silent a lot, lets maybe-Justin prod him when needed, and spends far more time dealing with wet eyes and runny nose than he’s entirely happy with. In between that, he talks about Thor, for the most part. It’s a nice, safe topic that addresses some of the stuff he’s supposed to deal with while leaving Pepper and Steve entirely out of the question.

He talks about awkward pauses and random frowns, about squirming under a scrutiny that feels ancient and very new all at once. He talks about Thor’s blunt admission that he doesn’t get it—though ‘it’ could refer to any number of things, right now—and leaves Steve and Pepper’s thin veneer of ‘we’re not freaked out we swear’ as they double check the kitchen drawers from time to time.

He admits, toward the end, that he’s actually kind of glad he botched his own suicide, and maybe-Bradin smiles and says ‘that’s the spirit’.

  


He _doesn’t_ admit the sight of a short brunette with pixie hair, baggy pants and poison-green eyes waiting on the sidewalk as he exits relieves him, but his stomach unties all the same.

  


“I see you haven’t been ravished yet,” she deadpans, and Tony doesn’t have that much effort to make to keep his face blank before he asks:

“Are we trekking again?”

  


She smirks.

  


“Don’t worry. We’re not going quite as far this time.”

  


The shape of her smile soothes the twinge of embarrassment at the reminder of his ridiculous lack of endurance from last week, but Tony still congratulates himself for deciding on a more intense workout routine as soon as he’s fully cleared. Hopefully, that should spare him more embarrassment.

  


He follows his guide without further question, stepping through the same damp dead-end as last time and taking her hand before she tells him to, shutting his eyes just in time to shield them from the green light and opening them on what appears to be a desert.

Flat gray dirt stretches as far as he can see, vast and empty under dwindling daylight and the starriest sky Tony has ever seen. He breathes crisp air—it smell like dampening dirt—and maybe gapes a little bit before he notice he’s been changed into a warmer variation of last week’s outfit. He he bites on a small sigh, shakes his head and focuses on his breathing as he follows Loki away from the dirt and towards what can only be described as more dirt.

  


“Why are we even walking?” He asks once he’s gotten into the rhythm of the hike, “You could have taken us right there.”

“I would pretend I was worried about mortals seeing us, but the truth is these things are more valuable when you have to put some effort into them.”

  


Tony isn’t quite sure if ‘these things’ means the sight-seeing itself or what it does to his mind—the latter sounds kind of pretentious, truth be told—but the former is just a bizarre thing to associate with Loki. Either way, though, he can’t deny last week worked wonders on his mood, so he keeps his mouth shut for the rest of the walk just in case he managed to ruin everything.

  


Thirty minutes later, Loki stops him with a hand on his shoulder as he leans over a gigantic hole on fire. Not a volcano mouth, not an artificial construction, not some kind of collective funeral: literally just a seventy-some-yards-wide dip in the ground where flames pop up between the remnant of what, Tony’s sure, must have been flat gray dirt at one point of its existence.

His face heats up and aches with it, old memories of leaning over candles in church licking at the edge of his mind—doesn’t seem too bad when seen from afar, but then you lean over and it’s like your hair is less than a second from catching on fire.

  


“You didn’t tell me we were visiting Hell. Or well, the gates that is.”

“It’s been called that,” Loki shrugs next to Tony, “But I can assure you no one would be foolish enough to leave such a precious artifact in so open a location.”

“Oh sure,” Tony says like the best place for a gate to Hell is something he discusses on the regular, “Yeah, way too horizontal, better put it in…uh….”

“Mount Everest," Loki says, disturbingly offhanded. “Well, ours is. Hades’ moved to California some decades ago—no clue as to where the others are though.”

  


Tony’s teeth click together when he manages to shut his mouth.

  


“You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  


Loki smirks at him—patented, blatant trickster smirk—and doesn’t talk until Tony tries to insist.

  


“This isn’t the door to Hell, Stark,” she dismisses with a flick of her wrist, “Merely a misguided attempt to get rid of some inconveniently-located gas. This is was solely engineered by your species.”

  


Well, she says ‘engineered’. Tony’s pretty sure that wasn’t the expected end result, but it sure is impressive, and he finds himself leaning closer again, half-expecting to come home with unexplainable burns all over his face.

(The others would have a fit.)

Loki’s hand stops him again, just as he gives an appreciative whistle, says something about not bringing him here so he could roast—and it’s like something pops into place inside his brain.

  


He hasn’t done anything for Loki.

She saved his life, sat by his bed as he emerged from his narrow brush with death, checked on him, distracted him after therapy, and what has he done? Asked for help dealing with _Thor_ , even though he knows full well how stretched their relationship is. Jesus, what an insensitive ass.

  


“Next time,” he blurts out, shame hitting so fast he’s almost dizzy with it, “I’m treating you to lunch.”

  


He gets a look of surprise for his trouble, followed with a raised eyebrow and carefully unmoved lips.

  


“There will be rumors.”

“Like that’s new.”

“And your friends?”

“Oh don’t worry,” Tony says with more bitterness than he’d anticipated, “They’ll get over it before they let me come near something sharp again.”

  


Which is ironic because there’s more than enough material in his workshop to off himself and take half the city along for the ride, but it was never really about the blades anyway. It’s just—well, it rankles. Pulls at his skin like a too-tight suit until it’s all he can think about, seeping so deep in his bones he can’t even make himself talk about it in therapy because he feels somehow, that pressing _that_ button is just going to open the way for the dark, ugly things he really doesn’t want to be dealing with right now.

He scratches at the stubble taking over the hourglass shape he’s spent a ridiculous amount of time deciding on and caring for, heart sinking further with ever velcro-like sound his fingernails produce. Hell, at this point he’s even starting to wonder if actually wanting to die would make the whole thing hurt less.

(He’s pretty sure it wouldn’t.)

  


Loki’s face scrunches up in something that looks disturbingly like the face Pepper pulls when she’s about to say yes to Tony’s crazier idea and then—without warning—she pushes a small, swiss-army knife in his hand, complete with the red and white flag on the handle.

And okay, Tony is accepting a knife from a know super-powered criminal who is also, in many respects,a certified basket-case—which, really, probably says a lot about his own mental state. Technically, there’s nothing that says Loki isn’t just playing long term by enabling him to attempt suicide again and actually succeed this time, never mind that it’s not actually part of Tony’s plans. On the other hand, it’s not like Loki hasn’t had occasions to finish the job in the past two weeks and, honestly, with the levels of scrutiny Tony is under these days aiming for him to die quietly at home would be pretty naïve at best.

So, it’s probably genuine, and it kind of makes his eyes wet. Just a bit.

  


“So,” he asks just to be sure, “How d’you know I’m not going to cut my wrist again?”

“How do I know you won’t cut the reactors of your suit and plummet to your death tomorrow morning?” Loki asks with a shrug. “If you truly wish to die, you’ll find a way sooner or later—a knife won’t change much to it.”

“It—it’s only been a month.”

“And you haven’t even trie jumping out of your own window yet,” Loki replies and, well.

  


She’s not wrong.

Tony stares at the knife, throat tight, and pockets it without a word.

  


“I did, however, enchant the blade to warn me should you turn it against yourself. If you’re going to die it may as well be a conscious decision rather than a drunken one.”

  


Tony’s chuckle doesn’t hold any humor in it, but it’s not bitter either, which is a surprise in and of itself, really. He offers his arm to Loki, heart too full and too brittle not to slip into his voice a little as he offers they go back.

  


She blinks, poison-green eyes the same shade in all her faces, before she takes the offered arm.

The air around them fills with green.

  


When he comes back to the tower afterwards, he’s greeted Steve’s terrible attempts at feigning nonchalance, Pepper’s tightly controlled worry, and the sudden urge to disappear in the very center of earth. He catches sight of Thor, hovering in the back of their shared space with this cellphone in hand and a vaguely uncertain look on his face, and decides to seize the opportunity.

He tosses a vague comment about beard care conversation and drags Thor away from Steve and Pepper—and Clint, Nat and Bruce pretending not to watch from the couch—and into the god’s own suite.

  


“I hope you’re good at it,” Tony finds himself saying once he’s seated in a chair that definitely didn’t come from earth, “I’m very particular about my beard.”

  


Thor nods, either unconcerned about Tony’s preference or focused on something else entirely, and scans the shaving kit he clearly had ready long before Tony came home.

(Like many things about Thor these days, he’s not quite sure what to make of that detail.)

  


The whole process goes on in eerie silence, Thor’s face firmly set into a concentrated expression that would make Tony fidget if it didn’t seem kind of rude. He lets Thor lather him in shaving cream, work at the hourglass shape until he’s satisfied with it, clean Tony up with hands far more delicate than you’d expect from him.

Not that Tony would have expected him to be a brute either he just…well, he doesn’t know what he expects from Thor, these days less than ever.

  


“You know,” Thor starts as Tony rises up from the chair—he falters when Tony actually looks at him, sadness passing over his features in the blink of and eye before he smiles and says: “I’m glad you survived.”

  


Tony nods, and beats a hasty retreat before he ends up sobbing into Thor’s ridiculously overdeveloped pectorals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't want/like to comment on AO3? [Comment on Tumblr](http://terresdebrume.tumblr.com/ask) you don't even need an account :D
> 
> Small & mostly useless trivia on this chapter to be published [here](http://terresdebrume.tumblr.com/tagged/Fic%3A-SOS-Ecrits-Avec-De-L%27Air) on friday.


	5. Gods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there's a vikings exhibition, some memories, and a lot of rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to send an enormous thank you to all thos who reviewed and left kudos and bookmarked this story, and also to those who just spent part of their time reading it.
> 
> I am honestly amazed at the response this story got, and I am really, really happy you guys seem to like it so much. Thanks a lot to all of you <3
> 
>  **EDIT:** Chapter updated November 7th 2016.

Tuesday goes by mostly without a hitch, if you discount Tony’s brief bursts of anger that leave him choking on fury and shame at the things he wants to do to Steve’s face…he’s pretty sure the super-soldier thing can account for the involvement of crowbars, but that doesn’t mean he feels good about wanting to hit friends and, frankly, Loki isn’t too helpful about this.

 **Tony:** is it bad that i sometimes want to punch my friends in the face?

 **Unknown number:** I question the wisdom of asking for my opinion on such matters. -L.L.

 **Tony:** gonna take that as a no

So, stifling violent thoughts aside, Tony mostly lazes the day away, which is both nice and skin-crawlingly boring.

Nothing new there.

  


On Wednesday, looking for a way to push a particularly boring meeting at the edge of his consciousness, Tony ends up browsing a twitter account that’s been gathering dust and cobwebs pretty much since the day Pepper opened it for him—most of the accounts he’s subscribed to serve more to make him sound cultivated than to distract him, and he’s surprised when a tweet from the Scandinavian House ends up catching his attention.

 

 **@ScanHouse:** Don't forget to visit our special #exhibition on #MythicalThor this week! Fun for all the family http://tinyurl.com/m45wbl3

 

It’s not that he’d normally be that interested on an exhibit devoted to a teammate (insert some flippant comment about how having a thunder God at home beats looking at crude sculptures of him, thank you very much, next question please) but browsing around the website reveals that this ‘Mythical Thor’ event involves several ‘Do it like a Norse God’ type workshops meant to highlight the difference between legend and reality, and Thor has been acting really weird these days.

Maybe a good laugh at stupid Earthian—Earthly? Earthling? Somebody should get on expanding the English vocabulary there—stories will help set him back on track.

And okay, sure, there’s always a risk it’ll end up in a disaster—between Tony’s issues, Thor’s occasionally volatile temper, and a whole host of potential misunderstandings and culture shocks, anything could probably happen…but hey, it’s not like a possible case of light misdemeanor is going to cost Tony—or the Avengers—or Earth—all that much.

Probably.

(The Pepper-shaped part of his brain that usually acts as his conscience—or at least his moral guide—disagrees rather vehemently but, well. Tony doesn’t even always listen to the _real_ Pepper, it shouldn’t be a surprise he ends up tuning the fake one out as well.)

  


Besides, he misses Thor.

He misses the booming voice and the jovial grins and the easy laugh—misses the casual shrug Thor uses to dismiss inconsequential mistakes or misunderstood joke. The weather around the tower has been damp and gray ever since Tony came out of the hospital—ever since his attempted suicide, see, therapist, he can use the word just fine—and it may not be too much of a big deal except it’s still freaking summer, dammit, and Tony needs the freaking vitamin D and general mood-lifting proprieties of a blue sky.

That, and for Thor to go back to normal.

He shouldn’t even be that affected dammit—not that the thought of it doesn’t make Tony feel oddly warm inside when he remembers Thor _probably_ doesn’t hate him for his cowardice or whatever, but still. Thor’s a God. Tony is a mortal with an ego. He’s pretty sure his dying should feel a lot less scary to an immortal giant who can manipulate thunder.

  


He ends up booking two tickets before he lets his brain catch up with him and remind him of all the possible unpleasantness he might have to face, from knowing he’s given Pepper a field day to journalistic outrage to, possibly, offending Thor so much he’ll leave the planet altogether.

(Nothing good ever comes of that, anyway.)

  


  


Tony finds out about Thursday being “Thor’s day” from a text Loki sent late enough on Wednesday night that’s closer to Thursday morning already, and spends the next two hours wondering what to do about it. Thor, to many people’s surprise, turned out to be the kind of guy who’ll be delighted by a box of Poptarts if he knows you bought it because it’s his favorite treat—but he’s still as gloomy as ever and Tony kind of wants to change that but he’s not sure how.

Hell, even the Scandinavian House doesn’t sound that bright an idea anymore, and Tony hasn’t even  talked to Thor about it yet because there’s a chance things will go wrong and while Thor _probably_ isn’t going to try and die if they do, Tony just doesn’t want to make anything worse. Hell, he’s had enough of innocuous events having disastrous consequences for a dozen lifetime already, no need to add to the list.

  


But.

Thor is his friend.

And he’s not feeling good.

And as far as avoiding his feelings go, tony figures caring about others’ is a better alternative than drinking himself stupid for today.

  


He buys a box of macaroons and leaves them in the kitchen for everyone to share, a hasty ‘Happy Thorsday’ scrawled on a piece of white bristol resting on top of it—then he hides in his workshop for the rest of the day in the hope that not having Thor to look at will prevent him from over-thinking things.

(It doesn’t work, but at least it was worth a try.)

  


  


Friday morning greets Tony like sand under his eyelids, the corner of his eyes crunchy with crust—and frankly, he should probably be impressed that his body managed to produce so much of it in twenty minutes but he’s too tired to care. He catches a hold of Thor earlier than anticipated and, in a fairly typical display of his people’s skills, he blurts the whole thing out so fast that Thor has to make him repeat it twice before he understands Tony wants to take him to a museum.

Tony wanted to go there incognito—picked out his most worn out Motörhead shirt and oldest snickers—but Thor insists to put on his full princely regalia—with the red cape and the winged helmet and everything—because it’ll please the children and really, how is someone like that even friends with Tony?

(Well, Rhodey is kind of like that too, but Rhodey was a stupid student at the same time as Tony and drunk with him most of the time. Rhodey has excuses that Thor doesn’t.)

  


The end result is they’ve barely been inside for five minutes before a primary school class surrounds them with awestruck expressions—Tony doesn’t quite know if he’s happy or sad to be completely overlooked—while a soft-looking middle-aged man tries to herd the children into some sort of order.

(It’s a lost cause. Tony has seen the look on their faces often enough to know they’re not shedding their retinue anytime soon.)

  


The first workshop goes pretty well—Tony mostly tunes out the museum staff in favor of watching Thor’s answer questions with wide gestures and wondering when he got to know the God well enough to see through the fake joviality. The kids have a blast trying their hands at embroidery, and Thor babbles on about the evenings he and his brother would play with wooden toys at their mother’s feet when she crafted new tapestries.

(His voice turns wistful when he segues into how Loki always seemed to like new items betters but once burned his hand pretty bad to retrieve a cat figure sculpted after Frigga’s pets from the fireplace it landed in. Tony almost wants to put a hand on Thor’s elbow, but he’s not sure he’s supposed to have heard, and clasps his hands behind his back instead.)

The second workshop starts out even better, mostly because sword-fighting is always a success with kids of all ages, and having Thor’s entirely true—although, Tony suspects, heavily edited—campaign stories to punctuate the event just makes things even better. The girl Thor engages in a fake duel almost bursts with pride afterward, and the day seems well on its way to being entirely made of awesome—which even Tony, in his less than energetic state, can appreciate—until they reach the third workshop, where they’re supposed to learn about the physical differences between Thor from the myths and Thor from the Avengers.

Thor storms out not five sentences into a story about Loki and Odin and some kind of alliance with Frost Giants, and Tony ends up gaping at their little entourage, giving a half-aborted gesture of apology, and running off after his friend.

  


(Truth is, he could punch himself for failing to remember Loki featured in Norse mythology too, and he’d probably be doing it right now if the sky overhead hadn’t turned almost black with clouds. Priorities. He has them.)

(Sometimes.)

  


Thor is slumping on the sidewalk in front of the museum when Tony finds him, cape unnaturally bright against the near-night, and Tony wonders if the terror in his stomach is something unique to him or if Rhodey felt it, too, all those times when he’s had to pull Tony out of the emotional gutter by the scruff of the neck.

(It occurs to him, not for the first time, that Rhodey really deserves a better friend—someone who won’t put him in that position over and over again and, really, Rhodey should probably have split a long time ago if he’d—but no. No. Now isn’t the time for Tony to feel miserable about his shortcomings—plenty of time for tat later. Right now, he needs to fix this mess.)

He makes a mental note to sent Rhodey some kind of fruit basket wherever he is and goes to sit next to his fellow Avenger, shoulder squeezed between Thor’s thick biceps and a trashcan. Heavy drops land on his hands—his neck, his head—as he settles down, and by the time Tony finds a semi-comfortable position the rain falls in sheets thick enough to remind him of the monsoon more than regular New York weather.

  


“Loki told me, once,” Thor begins before Tony can figure out what to say, “that he could never quite look at the sky without worrying about the smallest cloud.”

  


Thor’s chuckle is made of bitterness, and it stains the cold silver of his helmet when it lands.

  


“I laughed and told him it was a stupid thing to do.”

  


Tony shifts against the trash can, ignoring the awkward angle of his waist and legs so he can keep his eyes on Thor’s hand as water splatters over them, chest tightening. It really was a stupid thing to say but then—well, Tony isn’t sure many people would have fared better.

Besides, now doesn’t seem like the best of time to say that.

  


“You—you remind me of him. Of—of who he used to be. Who he may still be. And that—it—ah.”

  


Thor pauses and breathes in deep, fingers tightening around his helmet until it turns his knuckles white, and Tony wills himself not to see anything of Thor’s face when he finishes in a raspy whisper the rain almost drowns out:

  


“I fear he may make the same decisions you made, one day, only—”

  


Another pause, another deep breath. Tony almost wants to close his eyes.

  


“If it hadn’t been for that woman, we would have lost you last month. My brother is a faithful—he doesn’t bring strangers to his bed, and he left all who cared about him in Asgard. What if he did what you did, when no one was there to save him?”

  


Tony’s fingers dig into his thighs as cold water seeps through his shirt and onto his skin, leeches warmth out of him even as the inside of his cheek burns with the strength of his bite. For a brief, crazy, dangerous moment, he almost wanted to tell Thor everything—who really saved him a month and a half ago, who he’s been with after therapy, what they’ve done—he wants it so much it hurts, but then Thor starts speaking again and the moment passes with only the aftertaste of blood left in Tony’s mouth.

  


“Why would you even think of doing this, Tony, is what I’d like to know. You have everything a mortal could wish for and more—friends who value and care for you…why would you try to leave it all behind in such a way?”

  


God, Tony is so glad Pepper and Steve aren’t here for this conversation—which sounds really selfish and insensitive when you say it like that but, really, it’s hard enough trying to figure out an answer for Thor, he doesn’t know how he’d deal with the added mess of his conflicted feelings about the other two.

Besides, it’s not even like he’s got a clear answer on why he wanted to die—he kind of did back them, and he can sort of remember how he reasoned it to himself in the spur of the moment but it all seems so…bizarre, now. As if time made the whole thing even less coherent than it was to begin with and trying to recall his exact thought process became like trying to distinguish fine shapes through smoked glass.

There’s no way this conversation won’t leave Tony a crying mess in the middle of the street but, then, this is Thor. Thor, who shared stories about Loki when he clearly isn’t feeling like talking, who offered to shave Tony when he can’t do it himself. Thor who, not a week ago, took the time to say he was glad Tony was alive, something the others implied-most likely think—but never quite said out loud.

If Thor doesn’t deserve at least an attempt at a sincere and serious answer, nobody ever will.

  


“If knew,” Tony starts, stiff and laborious, “I’d tell you. Promise. But the truth is I—I don’t really know.”

  


He presses harder against his thighs, heart punching at his stomach hard enough he kind of wants to puke even as the rain around him intensifies, buckets pouring out of the sky and forces Thor to raise his voice a little as he says:

  


“I have no clue how to help either of you. I wish to but I—words were always Loki’s forte. I can broker a deal and make a rousing speech well enough, my tutors saw to that, but you…you require more than speeches and deals, and I don’t know that I can give you that. Sometimes I feel as if the slightest word, a mere inflection could break you and that—it’s unsettling.”

  


It’s supremely weird, Tony decide, to watch Thor’s strong, golden warrior stance fold away into incertitude and doubt—he’s a literal _god_ for heaven’s sake! He shouldn’t even know what doubt is, and yet here he sits, wondering and prodding like any dumb human on this stupid planet would when confronted with the mess that is Tony’s head. It’s strange and unsettling and maybe a bit scary but a the same time—and fuck, even in Tony’s head it sounds shitty—it makes Tony’s heart swell with affection for Thor so fast even the rain doesn’t seem quite so cold after.

Sure, Thor was probably just venting about his own issues, but it also feels like he’s made a step in Tony’s direction which, he realizes with a start, no one else has done since he came out of the hospital.

  


Well, he’s seen the way Steve and Pepper look at him—feels the burn of their care every time he remembers the swiss knife in his pocket—and the way Clint and Nat glare at journalists who ask why Tony’s been AWOL from the avengers’ missions. Hell, he’s drank more of Bruce’s awful herbal tea in the past month and a half than he has in the whole of their acquaintance before that—but despite of that it always sort of feel like they’re talking at him more than they’re talking to him.

He’s not quite sure where the thought comes from—wouldn’t manage to pinpoint a specific word of phrase that clued him in—and he supposes maybe part of it is that they don’t want to make things worse or just don’t know what to say. Tony himself probably wouldn’t know what to do in their place, either.

That doesn’t change the fact that Thor is the first to actually talk to Tony and the knot in his throat thickens his voice as he says:

  


“This helps. I mean it doesn’t—it’s not some kind miracle or whatever, but it’s—you help. When you listen. You help.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Thor says, the rain easing off around them, “Although I wish I’d known to do this before it was too late.”

“Well,” Tony shrugs, hoping his face doesn’t somehow betray the way his thoughts have drifted toward Loki and his texts and his help, “I’m still alive, so ‘too late’ is kind of a debatable term, as far as I’m concerned.”

 

It’s not perfect, and it’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s a comforting thought nonetheless.

 

Saturday is a ‘get plastered for no reason’ kind of day. Nothing special even really happens except for the part where Tony’s brain decides it’s time to play ‘are you a human-shaped waste of space’ with him and wins again, which explains why he’s drunk off his ass when his phone rings with a text from Loki.

 

 **Unknown number:** Talk me out of doing something stupid. -L.L.

 **Tony:** isit dying spoons hair stupid or ummaswallow some pillz stupid? Cause im not sure i can handle that

 **Unknown number:** Stark, are you drunk?

 **Tony:** no;

 **Tony:** maybe

 **Tony:** dont tell pepper

 **Unknown number:** Stay where you are.

Somewhere in the scotch-fogged parts of his brain, a couple of gray cells valiantly try to tell Tony he should probably take this a little more seriously, but he can’t really remember why, and it wouldn’t be the first time Loki did something stupid anyway. That, and somehow Pepper not knowing about his drunken state has somehow morphed into an absolute priority—though he’s not quite sure why, either—which, considering the state he’s in means there’s not much room in his mind for anything else.

 

 

(Monday morning brings a hangover and painful understanding of what exactly is wrong when he’s asked to talk someone out of something stupid. He doesn’t stop jittering until the TV switches to a special about Loki destroying Harlem.)

 

 **Tony:** please tell me you're okay.

 **Tony:** alive at least.

 **Tony:** nvmind saw the news. Avengers incoming

 **Tony:** you should stop destroying stuff when you're pissed off

 **Unknown number:** You shoul stop drinking. -L.L.

 **Unknown number:** You also owe me a new shirt. It wasn't vomit-proof. -L.L.

 **Tony:** yeah sorry. thanks for that though.

 

“Feeling better?”

  


This Tuesday, Loki is a plump little woman in a flowery shirt and neat suit pants, reddish-brown ponytail tumbling down her back and poison-green eyes shooting tony an openly speculative look. He scratches at his neck, and looks at the ground—it’s not like he hasn’t earned it.

  


“Not sure,” he admits, “Today—I wasn’t exactly in a happy place this weekend and—”

“Yes,” Loki interrupts, softer than expected, “I noticed. What happened?”

  


In theory, this would be a perfect moment to have a sudden realization and do a heel-face turn—leave Loki behind and never look back. Probably spare the both of them an eternity of capital T Trouble down the line, too—but then again Tony has had numerous occasions to do just that up until now and he never did. It seems silly to start now that Loki has more ways to hurt him than pretty much all of his friends combined, and without even bringing physical violence into the mix.

So he spills—how he dined with Pepper and Happy who told him they were engaged, how Happy tried to make sure it was alright and mistook Tony’s lack of enthusiasm when he said yes for jealously. How he’s not quite over his brief dating stint with Pepper and probably never will be because Pepper has been holding him up at arm’s length ever since they’ve met each other and their relationship is clearly marked by a Before They Dated and After They Dated and Tony will probably never forgive himself for that. Tony talks about how he wants his friends to be happy—no pun intended—but couldn’t quite convey that in a way that prevented Happy from getting worried and telling Pepper about it.

Then there was the awkward “we talked about this, Tony” bit with Pepper which kind of slipped from ‘I’m not jealous’ to ‘I feel like shit about our breakup and being such a piece of crap at relationships’ which then escalated into ‘I’m worried I’ll end my life alone and friendless’ and Pepper—dear, brave, beloved Pepper—tried to help but it started with ‘maybe you could’ and Tony fled the scene before she could finish that train of thoughts, locked himself away from the world, and drank himself stupid with instruction for Jarvis to open to no one unless his life was in danger.

On the one hand, it didn’t do anything for his mood or short term memory—the last bit was a surprise. Alcoholic oblivion used to be easier to achieve—but on the other hand, nothing worse than Loki losing a shirt and Tony winning a killer hangover happened, so it sort of counts as progress from last time, if you’re stubborn enough to believe it.

  


He frowns at Loki as he finishes his story, chest lighter for having voiced it at all, and pinches his lips together as he remembers the text he got before being pulled off the floor and into bed.

  


“It wasn’t a good night for you either,” he says without even pretending to ask a question. “What was that thing you needed to be talked out of?”

“Nothing you can do anything about,” Loki says, a hand straying to splay over her lower belly.

  


Tony’s heart picks up in his chest, spreading the prickle of sweat over his forehead and under his armpits, but he forces himself to remain silent. Loki would have talked if she wanted to, but she didn’t, and her tone clearly says she’s not willing to have a conversation about this.

Not that she’d pick Tony for said conversation, most likely—he can barely keep himself afloat, who’d be foolish enough to ask for his help? Come on. His silence rattles in his chest though, like a piece of shrapnel clinking against the arc reactor and echoing in the hollow places between his ribs. What if Loki really does need to talk but doesn’t let herself for some kind of irrational reason, like Ton _y_ often does? What if not saying anything makes things worse?

Tony decides he’d rather not find that out the hard way, takes a deep breath in and says:

  


“You can talk to me, you know? I mean. I don’t want to—intrude or anything, and you don’t have to say anything you don’t want to but I—you’ve spent a lot of time helping me lately and I may be taking you out today but it’s not like I’ve really…helped, you know? And uh—you said you knew what it was like to have, I don’t know, issues. And I just—I know what it’s like too. So. If you wanna talk, you can.”

  


He gazes down at Loki’s hand in what he hopes is a subtle nudge, straightens his posture—focuses on not fidgeting, hands carefully balled into fists at his side—while Loki’s lips twitch into a flimsy thing halfway between a smile and a grimace. She flinches when Tony moves in for a one-armed hug, making him backtrack and look around for—well, and exit. Maybe.

  


“So, uh. Is cheeseburger okay?”

  


Loki agrees without much enthusiasm, although it doesn’t look like she’s bothered by the idea either—it helps convince Tony that she’s just in a bad mood and not hating every second she spends with him—and they end up taking take-away sandwiches into Central Park, where Tony kicks at pigeons for far too long while a bunch of paparazzi bypass him and his Iron Man cap.

They don’t talk about the way Loki flinches when she bends a little too much at the waist, or about Tony’s outing with Thor and how he’s trying to help and how he misses his brother, even if he’s being very clumsy about it. In fact, they don’t really talk about anything more serious or important than the latest American Idols news which, Tony learns, Loki likes to watch with at least one unnamed companion.

(He tries not to let the thought bother him, but it’s not a big success.)

In the end though, Loki thanks Tony anyway, and that’s enough to pull his face into the closest thing to a real smile he’s had in months.

  


“You really should stop drinking,” she says before they part for real. “It’d be better for you.”

“Yeah well, trouble is, I don’t think I could.”

  


Tony tried before, several times, including that one time he thought it’d help fight the blood poisoning from the Arc reactor, but it never really took and honestly, he’s kind of given up now.

  


“Maybe this time will be different,” Loki says, “You’ll have help.”

“I had help before.”

  


Pepper and Rhodey tried to ban him off alcohol several times in the past, but for the most part Tony just turned so insufferable they had to chose between give up on his sobriety and give up on _him_ and, for some reason Tony will probably never figure out, they picked him. None of these times were particularly happy or beneficial to anyone, and Tony’s trying to figure out how to explain that when Loki pulls a face like she can’t believe what she’s about to do and says:

  


“If anything, you didn’t have Thor. He can be quite…persistent. In his crusades.”

  


Half—well, more than half really, but that’s how the saying goes or something—of Tony is still pretty convinced he’ll fail in a spectacular way. But then again, now that he’s gone from aggressively obnoxious drunk to a plain depressed drunk, the interest of getting plastered has grown even more dubious than it already, and maybe letting go of the bottle won’t make things much better but at least it’s probably not going to make them worse.

Plus, it’s not everyday Loki spontaneously expresses something positive toward her brother.

  


Tony still isn’t convinced, but he promises he’ll try.

  


  


He comes home to Steve and Pepper in deep conversation together—they fall silent as soon as they realize Tony’s there, killing the vague intention he had of telling them about his new project.

(It’s probably a stupid move. He knows, logically, that more help can’t hurt, but there are too many things he feels about Steve and Pepper and Steve-and-Pepper that he doesn’t know how to voice even to his therapist—let alone his friends themselves—for him to rise above it and get the two of them involved just yet. He answers as little ‘how did it go’ questions as he can manage and goes in search of Thor.)

  


  


Thor’s first response when Tony tells him he wants to stop drinking alcohol is to ask if he wants to get drunk one last time before they empty the reserves or not.

  


“Uh, no,” Tony says, unable to hide his surprise, “I don’t think it’d be a very good idea. But…thanks? I guess?”

“It’s no bother,” Thor replies with an amicable shrug.

  


Tony would wonder if maybe Thor just hasn’t quite gotten over the shock, but then the sky outside the tower is clearer than it’s ever been these past few weeks, and it only gets brighter as Thor goes around gathering bottle after bottle after bottle of fine wine and priceless whisky and alternates between emptying them in the toilets and his own stomach.

(Tony counts five bottles in total and Thor isn’t tipsy afterwards.)

Afterwards—when he’s done combing the common areas and Clint’s usual food stashes for any remnant of alcohol, even going so far as to warn Tony about the temptation of perfumes when in a particularly bad craving mood—Thor pours them two tall pints of milk and puts one of them in Tony’s hand.

  


“This is about as ready as you can be,” he says, clinking his pint against Tony’s. “To successful endeavors!”

“Yeah,” Tony coughs and blinks at the sudden sting in his eyes, “That.”

  


He manages to down his drink—it takes him a while, mostly because Thor picked whole milk and Tony didn’t even know people could drink that filled with fat—and asks:

  


“Why does it feel like it’s not your first time doing this?”

“My friend Hogun has his own demons,” Thor replies with a sad little smile. “I will tell you the same thing I told him though.”

“What’s that?”

  


Thor grabs Tony in a brief, rough-hug that leaves him a little out of breath—and blinking like an owl who just got photographed with a particularly strong flash—before he grabs his shoulder, stares him in the eyes and says:

  


“I’ll help any way I can, and I have complete faith in your success.”

  


Tony manages to stay composed until Thor leaves his room—even for a little while after, but then Loki sends him another text, to congratulate him on his first day of sobriety.

 

It occurs to Tony then that he has not one, but two gods at his back, and wonders what he did to deserve that.

 

He cries for a ridiculously long time after that, but for once it doesn’t feel like a bad thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't/won't comment on AO3?  
> You can [go Anon on Tumblr](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/ask) you don't even need an account :D


	6. Lorna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony gets involved in Loki's problems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Updated Monday December 5th, 2016.**

“So Tony,” maybe-Kevin asks when Tony sits in the office, “how was your week?”

 

It takes longer than it should to figure out his answer.

He’s texted Loki a lot—or well, Loki texted him a lot, mostly with encouragements and congratulations on his brand new sobriety, while Tony mostly experimented with the many ways to express disgruntled groaning in written form, peppered with the occasional ‘I’m craving a drink and there’s nobody home, _help_ ’ text. Between that and Thor’s newfound determination to learn everything he can about Tony’s work—and honestly, if you’d told Tony a year ago that Thor had the brain and knowledge to understand his work, he’d have laughed at you—it’s been a full week since Tony touched a drop of alcohol, which is enough of a surprise to be cherished.

He’s taken Thor to a hot-dog eating competition—watched the contestants choke at the sight of Thor, and a restaurant’s owner all but burst into tears when they realized Thor had just won a year-long all-you-can-eat ticket at their place. (Thor saved the day when he asked for his prize to be commuted into a donation to the nearest pet shelter, but the scare was real and Tony would be lying if he said he didn’t feel both amused and guilty about it.) After that, they mostly just wandered in the surrounding fair and Tony listened to Thor’s stories about his younger days, reveling in the realization that he hadn’t done anything like this—a quiet afternoon with a friend—in quite a while before the museum disaster.

There were a lot of stories about Loki too, and the better days of his life next to Thor—in this particular case, about fair-going.

 

“His thinner frame may deceive you on that account,” Thor said when they passed one of those use-a-mallet-to-ring-the-bell thingies, “but in truth Loki is stronger than even I can hope to be. We visited a fair, once, not long after he was excused from our shared weapon training, and my friends teased him until he agreed to compete with us in a game of strength. He beat us all effortlessly.”

“Wait,” Tony remembers saying, “back up. He beat you _effortlessly_?”

“Aye. I was as surprised as you when I realized—I insisted he should make use of this and train more, but he was content with using magic and tricks instead…I thought it dishonorable then. That particular fight,” Thor confessed with a sad look at the ground, “lasted for three decades.”

 

He shrugged then, saying he’d rarely fought harder with his brother, and Tony remembers looking at Thor’s face and thinking it shouldn’t be that sad—like a forlorn golden-retriever puppy. It just shouldn’t exist.

Tony thinks about that—considers mentioning the way Loki stiffened in the middle of picking curtains for wherever he lives when Tony mentioned that particular conversation—but then he notices the shiver in his hands, takes a deep breath and says:

 

“I stopped drinking.”

 

And it’s only his fourth session—oh god, a month of this already—but he doesn’t think he’s mistaken when he reads a sort of surprised pride in maybe-Robin’s expression.

 

“An excellent initiative,” the man says. “It’s very brave to tackle it so soon after you came out of the hospital.”

 

So soon.

God, yeah, it’s only his fourth session here—only a month and a half after the hospital. Two teeny, tiny months ago, he sat on his kitchen floor and watched his blood ooze over the tiles as he wondered how fast people would get over his death.

The days flew by since then—passed him by like a car on the highway—and maybe that’s why it all seems so far away, so alien to his present experience. Maybe he’s just changed too much already. It doesn’t feel like it—not most of the time, anyway—but what other explanation is there? He’s certainly spent more than enough time questioning himself—his motive, his life, his desires—to do some changing, at any rate.

Sure, in a perfect world he’d have done all of this long before it came down to him, a knife, and sheer dumb luck that he didn’t die before Loki opened the mail he magically retrieves from the city.

 

(Why Loki, one of the most hated people in New York City, would expect to ever get any mail is beyond Tony’s comprehension, but he’s sort of given up on an answer to that one. It’s kept him alive, there’s no need to look the gift horse in the mouth.)

 

The world is far from perfect, though, and now he’s got a waterproof watch and a black bracelet he never takes off. He’s got a locked box under the sink where all the knives of the house are stored—he doesn’t know if the others gave up on hiding it or if they think he’s turned stupid, as well as suicidal—and an army of journalists going round in circles trying to figure out if his sudden absence from the night scene means he’s bought himself some self-respect or if he’s about to pull a stunt as—seemingly—stupid as putting a simple PA at the head of Stark Industries again.

 

Maybe it was a little too soon, after all.

 

 

“And how is it going?” Maybe-Gavin asks after a while.

 

Tony almost surprises himself when he says:

 

“Better than I thought it would.”

 

He clutches his hands together to steady them, wishes the shivers would just stop already, but he’s telling the truth anyway, which is better than nothing.

 

“I’m pretty sure Banner is trying to replace my blood with tea. Barton keeps bitching about wanting a beer—I think he’s trying to annoy me into staying sober out of spite. Oh, and I’m trying to figure out how to tell Thor I don’t actually like goat milk that much…it’s weird. It’s working though. So far.”

“Good, good. And what do Pepper and Steve have to say about this?"

 

Ah, Steve and Pepper. Always the big questions, aren’t they? Separate or as a tag team, Tony’s sessions always end up circling back to them—he’s not quite sure how to feel about it except for ‘supremely uncomfortable’, honestly.

Thing is, Steve seems to take his cues from Pepper for a lot of things where Tony is concerned, which wouldn’t be so bad if Pepper didn’t oscillate between acting like she thinks Tony is never going to stop drinking anyway, and acting like Tony’s sobriety spree is a sign that he’s about to try and off himself again…not that she’s right, but she can’t really be blamed for it either, given Tony’s track record with this.

Even Rhodey didn’t sound fully at ease the last time they talked.

 

Of course, those are mostly speculations. He doesn’t know how to talk to Pepper and she doesn’t sem to know how to talk to him either these days, so she talks to Steve instead and in return Steve has…well, he’s kind of taken to hyper-awareness where Tony is concerned, as if they’re living a second away from a head dive through the windows.

(Tony doesn’t tell the therapist about the swiss knife in his bedside table but oh, boy, would the mere thought of it give Pepper and Steve heart attacks.)

 

Mostly, Tony tries not to speak too much with either of them.

 

 

“I try not to think about them too much right now,” he admits with more than a twinge of guilt, “I…I want to concentrate on getting sober, first.”

 

 

Yes, okay, maybe postponing necessary conversations isn’t the best way to deal with things, but still. For now, he can either do that or destroy his progress in less time than it takes to say ‘Captain America’ so he’ll take the lesser of two evils, and tries not to show his relief when maybe-Justin doesn’t press the issue.

 

 

***

There’s no one waiting for him when he comes out of the cabinet this time, and he tries not to look too hopeful even as he looks around for the familiar pair of striking, poison-green eyes.

Loki, after all, didn’t make any promise of regularity or, hell, even permanence to his visit. He’s probably got a ton of other things to do that aren’t compatible with taking Tony out on a regular basis—super-villainous things, most likely, or whatever the Hell it is that Loki does when he’s not plotting how to throw New York into chaos…that doesn’t mean Tony hasn’t grown used to—eager for—the couple of unworried hours his kidnappings afford him. It’s nice, sometimes, to spend time away from people with too many questions they don’t know how to ask.

 

He drags things off. He pretends to check his watch—ten minutes past the usual time—his phone—twelve minutes—re-ties his shoelaces, looks almost expectantly at every woman that passes him, but none of them give him a second look, and none of them have Loki’s eyes.

He’s just about to go—telling himself he’s got no right to feel betrayed—when someone calls out:

 

“Wait!”

 

Tony whirls around, too nervous even for his own comfort, and spots a small yellow car halfway up on the sidewalk, a woman struggling to extricate her bag out of the passenger seat.

 

She’s taller than Tony is, and whiter too—almost like she should have red hair instead of a black mess of hair curtaining down to her shoulders. Tony takes her in—well-defined muscles, breasts small enough to be overlooked, a length of chain twisted into the hair behind her right ear, and a tank top that clings to her chest and shows off both her impressive biceps and her tattoos.

Tony counts five of them at first glance: a ring of knot on her left ring finger, a blue and black woman inside the left wrist, a snake made of knots twisting around the left biceps with its head curling on the clavicle, and the head of a wolf on her neck. When she turns around, talking with the driver for a moment, Tony spots a sixth design, something that looks like a tail—belonging to a very fluffy dog, maybe?—peeking out from under her top, on the left shoulder blade.

It’s miles away from any appearance Tony has seen from Loki, but the eyes, when they finally meet his, are still the same.

 

“See you tomorrow Lorna,” an old black woman calls out from inside the car, and Loki answers with a smile and a wave before he and tony are finally left alone.

“Lorna?” Tony asks, knowing he’s peeking into things that may not concern him, “Really?”

“Well,” Loki says with a shrug, “I could hardly use my real identity to get a job, could I?”

“You…have a job?”

“Yes,” Loki says with a roll of his eyes, “my job. My more famous activities don’t exactly pay the bills.”

“You pay bills,” Tony replies, blinking far more than he should be, “with a salary. And a job.”

“Of course I do,” Loki replies, frowning like Tony really needs to get his head checked again, “That’s what you do when you have a flat…or did you think I lived in some sort of medieval castle made of black stone and lit with green torches?”

 

Actually, Tony kind of pictured sewers or some sort of grotto stuffed between the subway lines, but Loki really doesn’t need to hear that. Besides, given the time it takes him to scramble for an answer and her renewed eye-roll, she seems to have guessed as much anyway.

 

“I thought you weren’t coming,” Tony admits at last, half because he wants to be honest and half to change the topic.

 

He tries not to show how disheartening the thought was, but he’s pretty sure Loki guessed that too.

 

“I wouldn’t stand you up when it’s your turn to buy me lunch,” Loki says with a regal shrug, “As I recall, you mentioned something about a French restaurant?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s this little place a block or two away—it’s a bit of a hole in the wall, but they make an excellent tartare.”

“I don’t eat horse meat,” Loki snaps, hand flying to her stomach, fingers crooking into the flesh for the barest of moments before Tony snatches her hand away.

“Okay, okay,” he promises, “fine, no horse meat! Their lambs pretty good too…you do eat lamb, right?”

 

Loki nods and gives Tony’s hand a bruising—but not violent—squeeze as they start making their way down the street, Tony’s hand still curled around Loki’s.

 

Later, when they’ve finally sat down and ordered their meal—the waiter gave Loki a weird look when they sat down, but Tony doesn’t care and Loki doesn’t seem to give it much thought either—Tony watches Loki’s hand stray to her stomach again as they watch a plate of tartare steak pass them by, something not unlike pain passing over Loki’s features for the briefest of seconds before Tony asks:

 

“Is everything alright?”

 

Loki looks down at her hand almost as if she’d been caught in some kind of shameful act, and she shrugs.

 

“I’ve seen better days,” he says, a hint of the old bitterness creeping into his voice. “I’ll manage.”

“Okay,” Tony agrees with slow caution, “but uh…I mean, I don’t really know what’s up with—” he gestures to Loki’s stomach, unwilling to risk using the wrong words, before he finishes: “I’m just saying…maybe there’s other ways to manage?”

“Like alcohol?”

 

There’s a tense silence—Tony can’t quite figure if he’s offended or if Loki’s shocked at his own quip—and then Loki admits:

 

“I hadn’t done this in a long time, actually. Four or five centuries, at least.”

 

Tony frowns at the reminder of Loki’s age, but forces himself to sty focused on what the man—woman? Sorcerer? Whatever—has to say.

 

“It’s only—i helps, I suppose. It clears my head, and it keeps me focused. So, I do this when I feel myself become too…I don’t believe aggravated is quite the right word. More like—”

“Depressed?” Tony suggests, “Stressed? Trapped? Helpless?”

 

Loki’s eyes widen for a second, expression shifting through a surprised kind of fondness before it settles into something closer to the usual impassible mask, something not unlike a smile still hovering at the edge of Loki’s eyes.

 

“Sometimes, I forget that you can understand this.”

 

The sad slant of lips that follows seems to lean toward ‘most of the time’ more than ‘sometimes’ so Tony grabs Loki’s hand again, just as their entrées makes, well, an entrance.

 

“If it makes anything better,” he admits with a rueful smile, “sometimes I forget how much older you are.”

“Relatively speaking, I’m actually younger,” Loki says, but she squeezes Tony’s hand before she starts on her lamb chops anyway.

 

His next words are hushed, and addressed to the tablecloth more than Tony:

 

“We used to live in a very different place, Thor and I. It was Asgard, but not as he would describe it today—it used to be darker. Colder. Before we took our freedom.”

 

Tony frowns at that—kind of wants to ask what freedom Loki’s talking about, and where this story is going, but Loki’s shoulders sag under the weight of her tattoos, his eyes stuck on his plate, and Tony stays silent.

 

“Odin wanted something better, more majestic. We all did. Then a sorcerer came along—he promised the best fortress ever built, able to keep any enemy at bay, and he promised to deliver it in three seasons if Odin would just promise him the sun, the moon and an alliance with the goddess Freya that would make him immortal. The Allfather wasn’t convinced at first, but Thor and I…we were like everyone else, eager for something better, but younger and more likely to beg for it.”

 

Somehow, between two sentences of Loki’s tale, the main dishes came and went—Tony can’t quite remember what he ate exactly—and they bite into their waffles without any real thought for the taste of them.

Dessert passes in silence—heavy, pregnant, almost, with the rest of Loki’s words, and by the time they’re out of the restaurant and Loki teleports them to an unnamed and empty beach, Tony is all but ready to outright ask for the rest of the story when Loki finally speaks, mouth half buried in the arms she wrapped around her knees:

 

“Odin agreed, but the forbade Gangleri to bring another person to help him, and asked for the fortress to be delivered in one season only.”

“No one can build a castle in three months!” Tony exclaims before he can catch the words, and Loki snorts.

“Yes, that was rather the point. Gangleri was supposed to miss the deadline and end up working for free…but that, unfortunately, didn’t take his magic horse into account. Svaðilfari was a magnificent stallion, and he worked well despite the poor treatment he received.”

“Ah…so Gang-something wasn’t a nice guy then.”

“Quite the opposite. He frightened me—and Odin’s anger when he seemed about to complete the work in time terrified me. He wouldn’t break the deal though—wouldn’t hear of such a dishonor, and neither would Thor for that matter…so I took the matter in my own hands.”

“How so?”

 

Loki sighs and buries her face into her arms, draws tighter into himself until there’s really nothing left to fold and his voice comes out all muffled when he starts speaking again:

 

“I used a spell, and turned myself into a mare in heat to draw Svaðilfari away.”

“Did—did it backfire?”

“No, it worked. Svaðilfari was so preoccupied with me Gangleri couldn’t managed to get him off me in time, and—”

“Woah, wait! Wait, wait wait! What do you mean, ‘get the horse off you’?”

 

Loki looks at Tony like he’s lost most of his brain power.

 

“What did you think a stallion was going to do with a mare in heat, exactly? Animals are rarely fond of card games.”

“I—but—the consequences—”

“I had a child,” Loki shrugs. “Sleipnir, my eldest—”

“Ju—there was a kid? A real—holy shit he must be so fucked up!”

“What kind of parents do you think I—“

“Lok—Lorna!” Tony protests, even though he does have some doubt about her capacity to raise a kid, “I’m just—the kid was born of rape!”

 

A pause as Loki blinks, seems to think it over and shrugs:

 

“Oh, that. No, I made sure no one gave him grief over it.”

 

She laughs at Tony’s face then, oddly—shockingly devoid of anything remotely like despair—before she smiles, open and fond in a way Tony has never seen on her face:

 

“You know,” she says with a sigh and a sparkle in her eye, “I don’t mind it all that much—it’s not worse than any other battle wound and, if anything, I’m glad I have Sleipnir in my life…you’re the first person who ever thought to ask though. Thank you for that.”

 

Tony, who was just about done bracing himself for some kind of breakdown—hysterical laughter, tears, sobbing, maybe even something dramatic like crying until she vomited—has no response for the calm, ‘thank you for the gesture’ kind of smile hovering over Loki’s lips, like he’s discovering an entirely new person all at once.

 

“Is that…all the effect it has on you?”

“I feel like I should repeat that I willingly turned into a mare in heat in order to attract a stallion,” Loki says with a slight eye roll, “I knew it would happen before I even changed, and still went through with it. Besides, I don’t even consider what happened that days to be rape—it lacks the power dynamics inherent in the act. Rape isn’t about sex, you know.”

“Okay,” Tony concedes, dubious but unwilling to shatter Loki’s apparent tranquility of mind, “if you say so.”

“I do,” Loki says, smile growing a little stiffer, “just because everything you’ve seen up until now says I should be sobbing myself silly doesn’t meant I have to. I have far more than enough reasons to do that already without turning a simple miscalculation—which, by the way, resulted in the birth of a dearly beloved child—into anything more than it was.” A pause. “As I said though, I do appreciate your concern.”

 

Tony pulls Loki in a one-armed hug at the words, and he feels her stiffen, sigh and then relax all in one breath, before her head settles on Tony’s shoulder, one hand going to her stomach again. He looks at it for a moment before he starts:

 

“You know, the fact that you cut yourself here—”

“It’s easier to hide,” Loki cuts him off, clearly thinking the conversation has been going on too long already. “Don’t make a bad thing worse than it already is.”

“Okay,” Tony says again. Then, because he supposes someone should probably say it:

“You should probably stop, though.”

“When life gives me a reason to,” Loki replies without missing a beat, voice thickening with tears.

 

Tony should probably be ashamed of it, but in away it’s a relief. Tears, he has a vague idea how to deal with. He’s got no sodding clue how to deal with the calm from earlier.

 

“No offense,” Loki continues, “but you don’t see the things I see in my nightmares. At least this remedy doesn’t make things worse, and it beats the alternatives—including alcohol, by the way.”

“Okay,” Tony says again, trying not to stare too hard at the way Loki’s fingers have dug into the fabric of her shirt again, “okay, yeah, if it’s that or doing worse then keep going I guess. Just in case though—you can call me. Like, if you need something else to do isntead of that. You can call me.”

 

Loki stares at Tony’s face for a long time before she nods—she still looks dubious, and Tony has no certitude she’s really going to call him—self-harming urges or not—but at least the offer is there, which is probably as good as he can do for now. He turns his face back to the sea and sits there in silence, watching the sun set over the waves, and he’s not quite sure he’s not hallucinating Loki’s words when she sighs:

 

“I miss my family.”

 

(It still takes some effort not to say he misses his, too.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't/won't comment on AO3?  
> You can [go Anon on Tumblr](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/ask) you don't even need an account :D


	7. Loop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a Crow, a Coyote, and a Spider.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Edit:** Chapter updated January 5th, 2017.

“If you hear this,” Lorna’s voice crackles through the speakers, “I’m either at work or planning world domination. Leave a message after the beep and I’ll call back, eventually.”

 

Tony almost pulls his phone away from his ear just so he can stare at it, but the sweat and shivering keep him glued to the stupid piece of plastic, feet tapping against the ground while his free hand digs into the flesh of his thigh as hard as he can. Loki may be as obvious as she wans in her message after all, it’s none of Tony’s business—he just wishes she’d answer the damn phone.

With a trembling sigh, he wipes at his forehead—finds it clammy and burning—and tries to keep his voice as smooth as possible when he says:

 

“You know, I still can’t believe you’ve got a regular, nine-to-five job—it’s got to be something weirder like a—tattoo artist or traveling record seller or something like that—I mean, no offence, but can you imagine yourself in a bank or whatever? Please.”

 

Tony clears his throat, eyes glued to the way his other hand shivers against his will, and continues in a far less cheerful tone:

 

“Listen, I’m sorry to bother you but the house is empty and I’m craving a drink like you wouldn’t believe—so I guess now is the part where you start regretting sponsoring me or something. I should probably have some regrets too seeing as you’re suppo _sed t_ o be our mortal enemy but eh. Self preservation. Not my thing.”

 

He pauses, more out of breath than he likes to admit, and takes a steadying gulp of water before he keeps going:

 

“Well, I say ‘our’ but I guess I should count myself and Thor out of that, since he never really seemed to think you were an enemy and I’m kind of two-facing it these days. You guys should have a chat one of these days, by the way—I know you think he’s fucked up a lot and he says so as well but he’s trying so maybe if you could, I don’t know, talk to him without getting into a screaming fit—yeah. Just try it out, I don’t know. Could be worth it in the end.”

 

Somewhere in the back of Tony’s brain, a tiny, sane, negligible part of him screams in horror at the turn his monologue has taken and the horrors it might bring raining down on his head. The rest of him though---sick and weak and so very done with everything—ignores it and keeps going.

 

{ooo}

 

He’s surprised when Lorna reappears the following Monday, with the same tattoos and artistically messy hair—although the waistcoat and shirt make her look a lot more elegant this time around—but it vanishes quickly, snapping out of him and leaving only petulance in its wake:

 

“You never called back.”

“I know,” Loki answers as they make their way to their usual disappearing spot, one eye on her watch, “I was busy.”

“Too busy to call?”

“That is the general implication of ‘I was busy’,” Loki replies without missing a beat, “and I did text.”

 

Tony frowns at that—at the distance in her tone and the way she doesn’t seem to see the dirty concrete walls around her—and wonders what on earth could possibly have detained Loki away from the phone for five days straight.

 

“Feel free to blame my side-job, if it helps.”

 

Right. Lorna’s side-job. The one where a meeting usually ends up with one or more supervillains destroying an entire street of New York and stealing millions worth of precious stones for who-knows-what crazy reason, terrifying thousands of people in the process an _d_ nearly crushing a woman and her two toddlers under a block of concrete the size of a car.

(Tony remembers watching it fall, knowing he’d never reach the family in time to save them—remembers the way Thor yelled his brother’s name and the concrete zipped out of its trajectory to crash a good ten yards away from the woman and her children.)

 

All in all, Tony—and New York—could definitely do without that side-job, but he still hasn’t figured out how to broach the topic without putting an end to this strange relationship of theirs, so he reminds himself that no one has been grievously injured since the first few days of Loki’s stay on Earth, and decides to switch topic even as he grabs Loki’s hand in preparation for their travel.

 

“Where are we going today?”

“Nowhere just now.”

 

Tony frowns and waits for the green light of teleportation to blind him, but it never comes this time.

Instead, the world around him starts spinning counterclockwise in a slow, lazy movement _, speedin_ g up until the lines of it blur into a mess of gray—brick red—brown, and then green, green, green.

The world jerks to a halt like a roller-coaster bumping against the finish line, and Tony would fall face first into the grass if Lorna, one eye still on her watch, didn’t catch his arm to stabilize him. Tony waits until his brain catches up with the lack of movement before he casts a look around.

Far into the distance, he thinks he can make out a sliver of blue that doesn’t quite look like the sky. The rest of the horizon vanishes under green, grassy plains swirling under the wind, and no trace of human presence as far as the eye can see.

 

“Alright,” Tony says, doing his best to sound vaguely serious even as he grips Lorna’s biceps to avoid falling on his ass, “seriously, where are we?”

“I told you,” she says with a smirk in her voice, “we haven’t moved yet. As far as when we are, however....”

“Wait, you can travel through _time_?”

“I acquired the power some centuries ago. An excellent purchase, if you ask me.”

“I—you can travel through time!”

 

Alright, so maybe Tony kind of deserves having Lorna’s ‘duh’ face thrown at him, but then again he can probably be forgiven. Magic, he can deal with. It’s just science that hasn’t been explained yet. Time tr _avel_ , on the other hand—sure, there are some far fetched, what-ifs theories, but it’s not like he ever really believed them...and even if he had, there’s a difference between theory and practice, dammit:

 

“I can’t believe you can _time-travel_.”

“And shape-shift, and trick people,” Lorna smirks before she seizes Tony by t _he w_ aist and lifts him up on her shoulder as easily as she’d lift a toddler.

“You know,” Tony warns, leaning over her head like he’s three and trying to talk to his father’s butler, “I haven’t ridden a horse in decades.”

 

Lorna laughs which, considering the decidedly bizarre turn the situation took—he is, after all, literally sitting on Loki’s shoulders like he doesn’t weight anything—Tony doesn’t really have the heart to feel offended by.

 

“Don’t worry,” she says with a roll of her shoulders, “we’re not going horse-riding.”

 

Tony opens his mouth to say that he’s perfectly capable of hiking to wherever she wants to go on his own legs, thank you very much, but before he can say anything Lorna’s clothing ripples, her skin shivers between Tony’s thighs, and in a flash of green light he finds himself sitting astride a crow the size of a small cart, the green of its eyes all but twinkling at him as it gets ready for take off.

 

“You know we could have done this in the present, right?” Tony blurts, stopping Loki’s first movement in their tracks, “right?”

“Of course. No one in New York would ever notice a giant crow carrying Tony Stark around in the sky.”

“I could have used my suit,” Tony insists, “It’s not like you’re making me discover anything there—I already know how to fly.”

“You fly like a fish in a submarine,” Loki—Lorna—whoever—replies, voice dripping with condescension, “I’m taking you skinny dipping.”

“Okay but—”

“Besides, flying is an accessory to today’s outing, not its purpose.”

“Oh, great,” Tony says, does that mean we can—”

“Hold on tight.”

 

Tony grabs a handful of slippery feathers just as Loki lurches forward with a satisfied cackle and propels them into the air with a powerful beat of her wings—they slap against Tony’s calves hard enough to leave bruises, and his thighs aches with how rigid he need to keep them in order to maintain his balance, but he doesn’t pay any attention to that as he bends down and puts his arms as far as they’ll go around Loki’s neck.

It takes him a long time before he opens his eyes again, and when he does the sea of green stares at him past the blurry black frame of Loki’s feathers. The wind sweeps large waves through the grass, and Tony’s nausea recedes a little at the beauty of it, even as his field of vision expands until it encompasses what will turn into New York’s harbor and Liberty Island at some point in the future.

He clenches his arms and legs harder around Loki when they start going forward instead of up, lurching up and down in a regular beat like a mechanic horse on a merry-go-round, cold wind beating up so hard against Tony’s face he has to lean to the side to breathe.

 

Loki definitely wasn’t lying about skinny dipping.

 

The Iron Man suit swallows the world away from Tony—keeps it safely tucked into a small screen and away from the rest of him like the most expansive virtual reality system ever invented. In the suit, Tony has to cut the circuits if he actually wants to look through the mask’s eye-slits.

Flying on Loki’s back feels more like the world is trying to pummel into him, and Tony has to squint his eyelids shut against the onslaught of informations, the cold tears—the overwhelming certainty that, should he fall, he’ll have no possible amount of control over what happens to him this time around.

 

“How are you feeling up there?”

“I don’t know,” Tony yells into what he assumes might be the crow’s ears, “I’m feeling!”

 

It’s not even a lie. Loki’s wings keep beating at his calves, her feathers biting red lines into his palms, and he’s still stiff all over with fright...but then the winds against his face, the knowledge that the sky surrounds him on all sides, the way the world itself flays at him until he can’t quite tell if all of this is exciting or terrifying or both—he’s not sure how he feels exactly, but he can’t deny that he’s hardly ever felt that stimulated in his life.

He’ll take that over the numbness of the past few months any day.

 

“Good,” the bird laughs, “that was very much the point.”

“Mission accomplished then—can we go back down now?”

“Do you really mean that?”

“I don’t know!”

“Well then, do try to sit up straight, will you? You might be surprised yet.”

 

Tony swallows the undignified squeak of surprise rising to his lips and, with a deep breath, does as he’s told, gripping the feathers harder so the wind won’t catch him and pull him off his seat. Then, because it seems stupid to keep his eyes closed when he’s already getting into the more dangerous position, he decides to take a look around.

He’s seen what it was like already—green and blue cottoned with white as far as the eye can see, rays of sun bouncing off the sea in a myriad of golden diamonds that send sparkles into the very depths of Tony’s yes and brain—but it’s different watching it from the ground or through half-closed lids and taking it all in full. There’s a sentiment of infinity there that Tony hasn’t ever felt anywhere else—strong enough that, this times, when tears bloom at the corner of his eyes, he knows for a fact the wind doesn’t have anything to do with them.

 

“Okay,” he yells down at Loki, “that’s pretty cool!”

“Would you be interested in something even cooler?”

“Like what?”

“We’ve almost reached out destination,” Lorna smirks with a quick glance back at Tony, “now it’s time we caught the other guests.”

“The—what?”

“Brace yourself, this will be fast.”

 

Tony barely has time to compute the sentence before the crow takes a dive and sends them plummeting toward the ground. He grapples at the feathers under him, head bouncing against the crow’s tail as he remembers that one time he froze the suit’s circuits and nearly Icarus’d his way back to earth.

His knees tighten around Loki’s wings, his arms pull at feathers, his eyes screw shut.

 

He screams.

 

{ooo}

 

The Coyote—rich beige and brown fur glistening in the sunlight—laughs so hard in Loki’s claws Tony would almost worry about their bursting a vein if he wasn’t so busy trying to catch his breath.

 

“I apologize,” Loki says once a burst of green light took the wet stain out of Tony’s jeans, “I figured you did this enough on your own not to be scared today.”

“Well, I usually fly like a fish in a submarine, don’t I?” Tony throws back, more shocked than actually angry, surprising as that may be. “Next time give me some warning—or bring a freaking diaper.”

 

The coyote laughs even harder at that—Tony can feel them shaking against Loki’s legs even as they keep flying, far lower than they did earlier, the crow’s eyes never quite leaving the ground—before they heave a contented sigh and, to Tony astonishing lack of surprise, start talking:

 

“I have no idea where you found this mortal, Loki, but I like him already.”

“It’s actually more of a matter of when,” Lorna replies, only half of her attention on the conversation, “he’s from the twenty-first century.”

“Oh, good.” A pause. “Wait, when did you start traveling in time?”

“Around the sixteenth century—by Christian reckoning. Kali and I found an agreement.”

“And why, pray tell, did you bring this mortal so far into the past?”

“Excellent question,” the Crow replies, still scanning the ground, “neither of you would let me know. I’m merely upholding the loop.”

“The loop?” Tony echoes, but then Loki makes a soft ‘ah’, like he’s found what he was looking for, and Tony focuses on not vomiting through what is, admittedly, a much slower descent this time around.

 

{ooo}

 

“So,” Anansi—who, as it turns out, is a giant freaking spider—starts when Loki is done making introductions, “when exactly are we supposed to start this loop?”

“At some point in my future,” Loki shrugs—it jostles Tony hard enough that his attempt to get off the crow’s back ends in an undignified yelp and a frankly embarrassing fall in the dirt, but while the other three check to make sure he’s not hurt, none of them seem to mind too much. “I presume I was the one who instigated it, though I don’t know why yet.”

“It must have been of the utmost important if you went through the trouble of securing us both the power to travel through time—I assume the deed required serious negotiations?”

“Yes,” Loki replies with a slight shudder, “quite.”

“Four divinities and a special favor,” Anansi muses, fangs clicking as all eight of his eyes focus on Tony, “I don’t know what you did exactly, but it must have been something very special.”

“He is a very bright man,” Loki confirms with a nod.

 

Tony resents the way his face flares up at the comment, but there’s nothing to be done about it, really, and he looks at the ground for a long moment before something clicks in his brain:

 

“Wait, you mean you guys are gods too?”

 

There’s a pregnant pause, during which Coyote and Anansi stare at Loki, Loki stares at Tony, and Tony tries to stare at all three of them equally because seriously, what? It’s not like people meet gods every day, okay? He’s allowed an honest mistake!

 

“Very special,” Anansi repeats while Coyote muffles a snicker into his chest—Loki’s feathers ruffle, but he doesn’t protest.

 

Which is, of course, the moment Tony picks to miss an occasion of keeping his mouth shut:

 

“I keep forgetting you’re a real god,” he breathes in Loki’s direction, half-wondering _when_ he stopped thinking of Loki as a self-aggrandizing alien and started seeing him as an actual divine—or divine-like—creature.

 

He’s not sure what it would mean about him if it turned out he’d only changed his mind because they started becoming friends.

 

“You’re hardly the first,” Anansi says, shrugging with all four of his left shoulders, “and I don’t believe you’ll be the last—”

“Though I’m surprised you survived Loki’s acquaintance—”

“He was Thor’s friend before he was mine,” Loki specifies—without, Tony notices, denying the murderous implication of Coyote’s statement.

“Thor is almost as prickly as you are about this,” Coyote replies with a shrug, “he nearly skewered me last week, remember?”

“You called Mjölnir a toy,” Anansi points out—Tony thinks he sees Loki’s eyes widen in recognition before they close as Coyote snickers.

 

Tony watches Anansi kick the guy—god—in his lupine shins, to which coyote responds with a rough—but, it seems, playful—tug at Anansi’s fang, and before Tony can quite process what’s happening, he’s watching a full-on scuffle the kind of which he’s only seen back in college. It’s like watching kids measure dicks in the most good-natured way they know how, and the image clashes against the memory of Loki’s prim hauteur, of Thor’s easygoing power—of the way both of them can fill a room as easily as Tony would turn the lights on.

He’s not a bad orator if he says so himself, but even he can’t send shivers running down people’s spines just like that.

 

“If anything,” Loki states—a tad loudly—when the play-fight has gone one long enough, “I should probably have helped him along for suggesting I’d risk my head for mere trifles.”

“Wait,” Tony interrupts before the ribbing can resume, “you mean that thing with the horse wasn’t the only time you risked your life for the rest of Asgard?”

“We’re tricksters,” Anansi replies, disdain dripping form his voice, “putting our lives—or honor—on the line to reach our goals is part of the job description. Haven’t you paid attention to the stories?”

“My bedtime stories were from the bible,” Tony deadpans, unwilling to go into the topic of his mother or education. “It doesn’t matter though, I’m an atheist.”

 

For a long, heavy moment, all three gods’ attention focus in on Tony—even Loki, in his bird form, manages to convey some form of surprise at the words. Coyote and Anansi, marred with dust, stay very still, as if waiting for the prairie to start screaming ‘April’s fools’ and, when nothing of the sort happens, they dissolve into snickers, which turn into snorts of laughter, which turns into full blown howling in less than a minute.

Even Tony can’t help joining in, and goodness knows he hasn’t been the best with self-mocking these days.

 

“Oh, Loki,” Anansi sighs after a bit while Coyote wipes tears out of his eyes, “you always did have impeccable taste.”

“Of course,” Coyote replies in a perfect—if tad breathless—imitation of Loki’s prissier tones, “I may be from Asgard, but I’m not a complete brute.”

“Hey! I don’t sound like that!”

“You do indeed,” Coyote insists, and Anansi gives a suspicious cough, “or you did, I suppose, by your present reckoning. Either way, it is a good thing you changed, or I would have thrown you off a cliff some day.”

“You already did that.”

“See? My point exactly.”

 

Loki buries his head under his wing and refuses to talk to the other two until they solemnly swear to stop teasing him for the time being.

 

Tony laughs, but only until they decide teasing him will make an acceptable substitute for mocking Loki.

 

{ooo}

 

Tony comes back to his own time after several hours spent watching Loki get teased to hell and back, at least thirty minutes being a rabbit, grass stains all over his clothes and ants in places they really shouldn’t be, all of that topped up with a headache strong enough to kill. He’s sore all over, tired beyond belief, and maybe a little drunk without even having thought of drinking even once today, but there’s a grin on Lorna’s lips that he can’t help but answer in kind, satisfied with a day well spent.

 

“Well, they’re a handful and they gave me a killer migraine,” Tony tells Lorna with a contented sigh as they walk out of their alley and back into the twenty-first century, “but I liked them.”

“The migraine was unavoidable, I’m afraid,” Lorna shrugs, half her attention focused on her phone already, “they didn’t speak English back then, so they had to use other ways. It takes its toll.”

“Other ways?”

“No one thinks they couldn’t understand their patron god if they talked to them, do they?” Lorna asks, raising her eyes from her phone to meet Tony’s. “We can make any human understand us, no matter what languages we may use—it’s simply harder to do with a man of little faith.”

“Should I feel insulted? I kind of feel insulted.”

“You did tell three gods you didn’t believe in any kind of deity,” Lorna points out before she leans down to plant a kiss on Tony’s cheek. “Don’t worry though, I think they liked you, too.”

 

Tony likes the idea so much, it takes him several hours to realize he didn’t even think of asking for more detail on the time loop he’s apparently a part of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, if you'd rather comment anonymously, you can go [here](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/ask).


	8. Begin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“True,” maybe-Colin says with a little smile, “getting help for your loved one’s sake is better than not getting help at all. It begs the question, however: if this isn’t something you do for yourself, what is?”_

On Thursday, morning, Tony distracts Lorna from whatever problem she has with a long-winded rant about all the things that makes a Gran Torino an amazing car. Then he gets into an argument with Steve.

Or, to be more accurate, he gets into an argument with Captain America.

 

It’s a subtle difference which Steve, of course, denies with the most earnest honesty. He means it, too, that’s easy enough to tell—there are bags under his eyes and fairly explicit glances between him and Pepper that wouldn’t exist if he truly were indifferent to Tony’s fate, but just because Steve cares doesn’t mean he’s caring for an actual friend.

He can’t even be blamed for that, honestly—at the very least, Tony doesn’t blame him for that. It’s just that if Tony learned anything in first five weeks of his therapy-including life, it’s that he and the other Avengers really don’t know each other all that well. Okay, sure, he knows Black Widow can crush him with her thighs, and he knows Hawkeye uses hearing aids in the field, and he also knows that Captain America does something like five billion push-ups in the morning because prolonged congelation apparently turns people into health nuts.

For all of that, though, Tony has no idea what any of his fellow heroes do in their free time.

(Well, he suspects Bruce doesn’t have much more of a life outside his work than he himself does, but that doesn’t really count as knowing the guy personally, even if it makes him far easier to figure out than the others.)

 

Tony was never really a people person. He can, of course, charm and manipulate his way in and out of most situations efficiently enough: it’s a necessary survival skill in his position, really. Just ask Obadiah. Manipulating someone and connecting with them are two different things, though, and while Tony has been taught how to do the former since infancy, the latter is another kettle entirely...and robots, as experience proved numerous times, are just easier to deal with.

The end result is that, once Tony stops and take a good hard look at his life, it’s impossible not to realize that, yes, people around him are genuinely concerned by his antics—his well-being, whichever answer fits best, really—but it’s more for Pepper’s sake than his, and Steve is no exception.

It’s okay, really. Pepper is an amazing woman who Tony is lucky to have as a PA-CEO-best _-frien_ d-possibly-platonic-soulmate, not in that order. She deserves to have friends who care for her better than Tony does, and he at least knows better than act on his jealousy where she’s concerned. Even he has standards.

It’s just that knowing all of this makes it particularly grating to have Steve act like Tony is his long-lost best friend when he’s mostly just the most readily available target for Steve’s insanely universal protective instincts, at best.

(At worst, this is Captain America protecting an asset, but Tony has been an asset before and the idea of being one again is gut-churning enough that he squashes it with vicious ruthlessness whenever it pops up.)

 

Anyway, Tony points that out. Steve denies. Things escalate. There is screaming, and then Tony and Steve each go to sulk in their respective corners of the tower.

Thor explicitly disapproves, but he sticks by Tony’s side anyway, and the more vicious part of Tony’s brain wonders if the god is acting for his sake or for that of his brother.

 

{ooo}

 

On Sunday, twelve-feet-long, slimy slugs crawl all over New York and cover it in a sticky, neon-yellow substance that makes Tony feel like he’s being trapped in a giant chewing-gum. There are no reports of deaths, injuries or even allergic reactions so far, just insane traffic jams and the most epic collective tantrum Tony has ever witnessed. He still wants to put the things somewhere in the top ten of Worst Creatures He’s Met, if only because having to stay trapped under one of them for almost five minutes and realizing the slime in his suit is keeping him grounded makes him want to punch someone in the sensitive bits.

 

“Honestly,” he mutters into the comm once he finally manages to take his helmet off, “I appreciate Loki’s downscaling on the lethality front but this stuff is just annoying.”

“This,” Thor replies with a huff of effort—Tony didn’t even know he knew how to make that sound—“is not my—brother’s—work!”

 

Tony hears a shout of triumph, followed by the dull ‘oof’ of someone falling over, and tries not to snort when he imagines what Thor must look like right now.

 

“Right,” Hawkeye scoffs as he limps out of a building and toward Tony, left boot missing and half or his head covered in yellow, “clearly these have to be the latest Doombots.”

 

Tony is halfway through a protest—no way Doom would figure out how to make something like that, even if the manual slapped him in the face—when Steve and Natasha joins them with matching murderous expressions.

Tony almost wishes he’d gone back to the tower with Bruce when they realized the Hulk wouldn’t be of any help here.

 

“Point is,” Steve says, taking his cowl off with a horrible suction noise that leaves them all tying not to giggle, “Loki has to be behind all this.”

“I know my brother,” Thor says, “and I know his pranks—”

“If that counts as a prank,” Natasha says as she pulls a long string of slime out of her ear, “we seriously need to up our game.”

“Loki didn’t do this,” Thor repeats, attention half-focused on his hammer as he scratches some of the foul substances out of the carvings on the head, “it’s far too messy. He doesn’t like messy.”

“Tell that to the guys who had to clean up after the Chitauri.”

“That was chaotic,” Tony points out over the click of his suit’s emergency opening system, “this is just...yeah. Messy.”

 

The others turn to stare at him, splotches of hideous yellow peppered across their hair, faces and uniforms in a truly laugh-worthy display.

 

“Seriously,” Tony insists, “the Chitauri killed people. This just makes everyone look like a dumbass who got attacked by a sentient highlighter. Basic profiling says there’s a difference.”

“Tony’s right,” Thor approves—Tony pretends to fiddle with his suit so he can hide the proud little smirk trying to crawl its way onto his lips at that—“Loki’s specialty lies elsewhere. This seems to be the work of one of his friends.”

“What,” Clint asks from where he’s pulling slime out from under his armpits, “you mean there’s someone other than Doom who’s crazy enough to associate with Asgard’s resident nutcase?”

 

To the guy’s credit, he barely blinks when Thor glares at him, electricity gathering in the air around them and tickling at Tony’s neck with a strong sense of impending doom. No pun intended.

(The fact that three quarters of Thor disappear under stinky yellow slime probably helps making him look less scary, too.)

 

“Victor Von Doom,” Thor says, low, warning tone compensating for the undignified appearance, “is not my brother’s friend.”

 

There’s a pause while Tony and the rest of their group blink at Thor, mostly because Loki and Von Doom have been acting like proper little chums since the Asgardian crashed on Earth so they can probably be forgiven for their assumptions.

 

“Maybe,” Natasha concedes, carefully detaching syllables, “but there’s no one else we know who’d help Loki with his battle plans.”

“You don’t,” Thor replies, starting on his arm braces now that he’s done cleaning meow-thing up, “I do. In fact, I can think of a couple of people who wouldn’t pass the opportunity to annoy me on Loki’s behalf for the world.”

 

Tony watches Thor pick at his armor for a moment longer, then he scoffs, swirls his hammer into the air and takes off before anyone can ask who exactly he was thinking of.

Steve and the others trade perplexed glances but, when even several minutes of brainstorming don’t provide them with a satisfactory answer, they decide to stop looking the gift horse in the mouth and use the slugs’ relative harmlessness as an excuse to allow themselves early showers. The things aren’t hurting anyone, after all, and the lot of them will do more good by showing up for clean up later on than by hovering uselessly over the streets.

 

Tony spends the rest of the day wondering if Coyote and Anansi have a thing against messy pranks as well.

 

{ooo}

 

“There is a question I wanted to ask you, Tony,” maybe-Martin says once they’re settling in their respective seats on Monday morning, “this is our sixth session since you came out of the hospital, correct?”

 

Tony nods, more for form than because he thinks the guy actually needs confirmation.

 

“And you aren’t thinking of attempting suicide again these days, correct?”

 

Another nod. It’s a little less accurate, in that Tony still thinks about dying sometimes, it’s just that he knows he has no intention to act on it now. It’s the same end result, though, so he’s not exactly lying there.

 

“Very good. In that case, I think it’s time you told me, if you can, what brought you here exactly?”

 

Part of Tony wants to say ‘my feet’, if only because a lifetime of flippant deflections doesn’t go away in a few weeks, life-changing as they may be. Trouble is, while that answer would make things a lot easier on him for a few minutes, it would also be a waste of time, so Tony is kind of stuck trying to be serious.

The right answer—or at least, the expected answer—is probably something along the lines of ‘I wanted to get better’ but the words kind of stick against the dry roof of his mouth. It’s not that he was against the idea when he first came here, but he’s never been very concerned by his own health, let alone concerned enough to actually bypass his own issues and ask for help. In all honesty, if he’d been left entirely to his own devices, he’d probably never have ended up here.

Pepper and Rhodey, however, can be awfully persuasive when they want to, especially when he’s too tired to resist in the first place—and now here he is.

 

“I got scared, I guess,” he admits, looking down at his hands so he won’t have to meet his therapist’s eyes. “Pepper got scared. Rhodey got scared. I guess I just figured they’d know what to do better than me.”

 

It’s not a very fair thing to assume, when the situation was so new and nerves-wracking, but Tony has been doing that for decades now, and he’s never pretended to be perfect, anyway.

 

“It’s probably a good thing though,” he admits a beat too late, “it makes me work things out. Try to work things out.”

 

It’s painful, ugly mess of a process that makes him wish he could go and get teeth pulled most of the time—not to mention he’s still postponing the very important conversations he needs to have with Steve and Pepper and Rhodey, something he mostly realized since he started coming here. Besides, it would probably have been better if therapy had been an active choice on his part instead of the least bad solution he could think of at the time.

He still feels better ow than he did two months ago, and while it can’t be called great by any stretch of the imagination, it’s still progress. It’s better than nothing.

 

“True,” maybe-Colin says with a little smile, “getting help for your loved one’s sake is better than not getting help at all. It begs the question, however: if this isn’t something you do for yourself, what is?”

 

Three months ago, Tony would have launched into a tale of countless partners in his bed over the years, complete with exaggerations and purposefully teasing additions to make the whole thing sound more adventurous than it really was. He hasn’t hooked up with anyone in months, though—he’s thought about it a little, but it didn’t sound appealing.

Maybe because,f or the first time in years, he doesn’t have enough energy to pretend a second body between the sheets does anything to make him less lonely.

 

“I...go out,” he says in the end, surprised he hasn’t thought of that earlier, “with a friend. We talk a lot about—about things we can’t really tell other people. We get each other. It’s nice.”

“Good. That’s good. Do you do that often?”

“Every week after I come here,” Tony shrugs, “Lok—I mean, her schedule’s rather full.”

 

He tries not to look too panicked when he looks back at his therapist’s face, but if the guy guessed who Tony is talking about he doesn’t seem to be affected by it.

 

“It’s still a good thing,” he says instead of the yelling Tony half-expected, “it’s a first step. Maybe you could try and add to that list, though. Figure out other things to do for your own sake.”

 

Nothing comes to Tony’s mind when he gives the assignment some cursory thoughts—it’s not even like he started going out with Lorna on purpose, after all.

 

It’s not a bad project to have, though.

 

{ooo}

 

Tony surprises himself when he gets on tiptoes to greet Lorna with a hug after his session, but it’s been a while since he’s felt a smile pull at the corner of his eyes, so he tries not to over think it, and he smiles when she returns the hug.

 

“What are we doing today?”

“We’re celebrating an anniversary,” Lorna replies with a smirk.

 

Tony, who would be lying if he said he doesn’t like the idea of being surprised every week, follows her to their alley without being asked to, grabbing her hand as soon as she stops.

They’re traveling through time again, the world spinning around them faster and faster as its colors change—brick red and grass green and ocean blue and then black, black, black, until Tony can’t even see himself and wonders if that’s what it feels like to be blind.

At least he can still feel his own body, if nothing else.

 

“So, when—”

 

The end of Tony’s sentence stays stuck in his throat when he realizes he can’t even hear his own voice. In fact, now that he’s really paying attention, it’s painfully obvious he can’t hear anything around him—no sound at all, except maybe the lazy beat of blood in his veins—ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump—like a clock gone lazy.

There’s no light, no shape, no sound, no ground under his feet and no wall his fingers can reach for guidance—in his ears, his heartbeat picks up, keeps an anxious rhythm at the edge of his mind like a horror movie soundtrack and he’s about to—there are fingers around his wrist.

 

They slide down over his palm, slot in the space between his own fingers, and the knowledge that he isn’t alone—that, and the clothes he finds himself uncannily aware of now the panic has been short-circuited—brings his heart rate down like nothing else could have.

(He still kind of wants to pull Lorna into his arms just so he won’t have to satisfy himself with six meager points of contact—one palm, five fingertips—but he’s not sure how she’d take it, so he stays still.)

 

“Don’t be scared,” Lorna’s voice says in his ears.

 

It’s a flimsy whisper, a ghost of her usual tone coming at Tony from everywhere and nowhere all at once—Tony tries to tell her she’s making it hard to obey, but nothing comes out of his mouth and she whispers again:

 

“I can’t hear you here.”

 

Her voice echoes against nothing, faint and ethereal as if to preserve some kind of useless mystery.

 

“There’s no air, no sound, and telepathy isn’t one of my talents—this is why I have to use my tricking voice.”

 

Tony can’t decide if hearing her talk about perfectly normal things—or at least, things that wouldn’t be scary in and of themselves—is more creepy or weird. Murmurs and whispers, they’re not meant for ordinary conversation. they’re meant to scare people—or love them, maybe.

He can’t picture whispering to Lorna about physics either way, strange as they may be in this place—or this time, rather. He’d probably keep that for telling her things he never quite dares to say aloud—what she means to him, and how glad he is to have her, to have this. Maybe he’d admit how terrified he is most of the time, and then make stupid, unfulfillable promises like ‘I’ll always be there for you’.

In a way, it’s probably a good thing Tony can’t communicate here.

 

Lorna seems to have run out of things to say, though, and they stay immobile for a long moment, until a small pinprick of light appears in front of Tony.

It’s no bigger than a pin head, but after so long in absolute obscurity it burns at his eyes like he’s staring into the sun, and he can’t help but wonder where he is exactly, even as he watches the light grow. It flashes sometimes, bursts of flame-red and bright yellows mingling with blue licks of fire, and the darkness recedes, chased by what Tony can only describe as an explosion in slow motion. It floods Tony’s vision—makes his heart beat harder, his breathing deepen, and he can’t make himself tear his gaze away even when the pain becomes almost too much to bear.

 

There’s movement then, a rush Tony would call wind, if he could, but deeper, bigger than anything he’s experienced, like something shaking at his very core. When he opens his eyes again, unable to remember when he closed them, there are pieces of rock floating past him, bits of ice shining among them and gliding to the farthest recesses of the infinity of black they’re standing in.

Tony realizes he’s clutching at Lorna’s hand hard enough to leave bruises where his nails dig into the flesh, but he doesn’t care—it takes him a moment to understand the tiny, bright little things floating in front of his face are his tears.

 

“Is that—”

 

Tony stops talking when he realizes Lorna won’t be able to hear him, but with the newfound light it’s easy to see her smile at him, more amused than awed. Her lips don’t move when Tony hears her voice in his ears again:

 

“I would have gone for your cake-and-candles tradition,” she says, “but mother Earth is best left to her slumber. Besides, I supposed a scientist would find this more interesting.”

 

Tony, mouth wide open on words he can’t even untangle, let alone try and say, turns away from Lorna and back to the beginning of the world, chest tight with more emotions than there are ways to describe them.

Then quietly, a little foolishly, he says:

 

“Happy birthday, world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't/won't comment on AO3? Please, come tell me what you thought of this chapter [on tumblr](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/ask).
> 
> Comments and reviews make me want to keep writing :)


	9. Shatter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony probably should have watched his mouth, but then that would only have delayed the unavoidable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Edit:** Chapter updated on April 3rd, 2017

“I’m not sure what to do about my friend,” Tony admits almost before he sits down for his first session after the Big Bang.

 

It’s a bit of a liberation to say it—allows him to release tension he’s been trying hard not to think about for the past week.

The thing is, this thing with Lorna—it’s starting to feel very date-like. Tony tried to think about it from another angle, told himself this is a normal friendly thing to do—going on outings, giving each other support and weird gifts and spending who knows how much energy in magic just so you can see the beginning of life together. But, well. It didn’t work.

And the thing _is, eve_ n if Tony manages to get his own brain under control—even if he’s just being confused over nothing and he really isn’t interested in being anything more than friends with Lorna, who’s to say she feels the same? It’s not that Tony really think he’s irresistible, but Lorna is a complicated person and she’s proven she could go for the most unexpected moves already, what if, for some reason, she starts feeling different about Tony?

 

“In what way?” Maybe-Kevin asks, and Tony groans.

 

Before he went to therapy—before he thought he’d ever need it, before he really believed in it—if you’d asked him how it worked, he’d have expected the patient to be this pathetic, permanent mess always on the verge of collapsing in tears. He’s learned better since then—although he’d be lying if he said he’s happy about the knowledge—and while the emotional mess part of things is familiar to him by now, it’s not exactly an accurate reflection of his existence.

When he started thinking about this—when Pepper put her foot down and forced him to get some kind of help—he sort of expected whoever would be in charge of his case, he more or less would be attending a class. He’d _s_ it in an impersonal office and be expected to be quiet while some schmuck told him how to deal with his life, his problems, his emotions.

He loathed the idea, of cour _se._

 

As it turns out, though, the actual practice of therapy is both a lot less frustrating and a lot more so. He’s not expected to sit down and let people do what needs to be done here—it’s a relief, really. After years and years of following Stain’s instructions only to discover the guy wanted him dead in the end, after years of waiting for Pepper’s instructions to decide on anything—whether he followed them or not—it’s nice to have a space where the expectations he has to meet are kept to a minimum.

On the other hand, now he’s got to figure things out for himself, without guideline or instruction manual and, much like inventing a whole new world of robotics or creating a new chemical element, it’s grueling, hard, occasionally mind-numbingly dull work. Who knew being your own person—knowing what you want, what you need, what you’re going to do, and whether and how these three things overlaps—took so much effort?

 

“I...kind of wanted to kiss them last week.”

 

Only for a moment, a simple impulse easily contained to that one second between the moment Tony said goodbye and the moment Lorna turned away and left in a flash of green light. It was still there, though, and Tony hasn’t been able to think of anything else for most of the week.

 

“Okay,” maybe-Gavin says with a nod that doesn’t completely conceal his surprise, “and how do you feel about that?”

 

In all honesty, Tony was kind of hoping he’d get his answer here—he can probably figure things out himself, but it would be nice, sometimes, not to have to do so much soul-searching to get it. It’s probably what normal feels like. ‘Normal’, for better or for worse, has never really been him, though, so Tony sighs and tries to sort his own thoughts out before they tumble out of him.

The thing is, he does better with clear lines. His relationship to Pepper was—is—a constant stream of what-are-we-s, where do we stand with each other, where do we want to go, what do we want to do. Every day came with its lot of surprises and Tony liked it that way—loathes the idea of routine with a fiery passion—but underneath it all, the whims and caprices and fights and abrupt changes, there was always this certitude that Pepper was there for Tony and would continue to be there, just like he’s firmly decided to always be there for her, sloppy as the results may be.

 

Lorna isn’t even Lorna all the time. She’s a woman and then a man and she could probably be someone in between if she wanted. She’s there for Tony, but sometimes she isn’t and she doesn’t sound concerned about it—she gets him and she’s helping him through one of the roughest patches of his life in a way no one else manages despite their best effort, but when Tony talks about the other things he does—his projects for Stark Enterprise, the latest progresses in robotics, the occasional reports on charity work—Lorna’s interest turns from earnest to polite, like she couldn’t be less concerned about the work of Tony’s life.

There’s no labels with Lorna, and that’s liberating—that means Tony doesn’t have to conform to the expectations that come with them—but then there’s also no certitude with her, and that is surprisingly terrifying.

 

“I don’t know,” Tony says at last, figuring the answer to his therapist’s question as he talks, “I—we haven’t really defined our relationship at all. I don’t even know if they think we’re friends or...I don’t know. And I mean, it’s great that we’re...flexible, I suppose? But it also means I don’t know where the limits are. I don’t know if I’d be jeopardizing something if I indulged in the impulse or—or even just talked about it.”

 

He thinks there’s a friendship to lose there. Hopes there is. But there’s no telling, really, and Tony wishes—not for the first time—people could be as simple as machines.

Machines—robots, even Jarvis—they don’t ask for more than you can give. They don’t give you the disappointed puppy face Tony has seen on Steve far too many times, don’t sigh in despair and worry like Rhodey has from the very beginning of his relationship with Tony, and they certainly don’t splutter the way Pepper does when she’s too flabbergasted for words.

(Machines have never pushed Tony away without l _ooki_ ng at him, sighing about being busy and for the butler to remove the nuisance in the same breath.)

 

“So,” maybe-Rodin starts, carefully filling the silence that follows Tony’s words, “am I correct in understanding that you’re frightened at the idea of losing that friend, should you try to redefine your relationship?”

“Yeah,” Tony mumbles, studiously avoiding the therapist’s eyes, “something like that. I just don’t want to mess up.”

 

Tony has a grand total of seven friends—four he created himself, two of the most long-sufferingly loyal people on earth, one who’s been a central point of Tony’s daddy issues since long before they met, and another who mostly started talking to him because Tony reminded him of his brother.

Plus, of course, said brother—sister, sibling, whichever Tony is supposed to use—who is a great support but may or may not be a friend in the end.

Excepting the four non-biological ones, they’ve all gotten more trouble than anything else out of their acquaintance with Tony—it’s a miracle they haven’t left already, one he’s keenly aware of. What happens if Tony messes things up with Lorna, babbles about it to the wrong person—or one too many times, or in the wrong way—and throws things in jeopardy there as well?

 

“I just wish Loki wasn’t such a complicated person,” Tony sighs, “or that I was better at dealing with it, I don’t know.”

 

Truth be told, it’d be nice if Tony were a nicer, worthier person to be acquainted with—he wouldn’t be worried about Pepper deciding this...thing...with Loki is the final straw, or about Thor refusing to talk to him over some kind of backward standard he may or may not have. If he were a better person, he wouldn’t have to be worried about ending up alone again, stranded in his life the way he was at MIT, except this time there would be no Rhodey to take pity on him and rescue him from his own foolishness—no Pepper, no Thor, not even _Fury_ to pick him up and help him sort through his own mess.

Then again, if he _wer_ e a better person, maybe Tony wouldn’t have to deal with that kind of problems to begin with—would deal with his own mess instead of imposing them on his friends. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to keep them around, but at least he wouldn’t be gambling with his life—his place with the Avengers, his place in society at large, everything he’s ever created—for someone as volatile as Loki.

 

“Shit,” he admits, the word ringing loud after the too-long silence, “I don’t know what to do about this.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know!” Tony repeats _,_ because that’s not for lack of trying to think about this rationally. “I don’t want people to be mad at me—not that friend, not my other friends—and I don’t want to ruin anything and I just—I don’t know. I have no fucking clue what I want to do. I just want things to be simple.”

“That’s understandable,” maybe-Bradin replies with a tense little smile, shoulders oddly stiff for a phrase he’s probably heard ten thousands of times before, “but I’m sure I’m not teaching you anything when I say that interpersonal relationships are never simple.”

“I’d settle for not disappointing anyone,” Tony mutters as he buries his face in his hands.

“Alright. Who is it you think you may disappoint?”

 

Well, that’s the million dollars question, isn’t it?

It could be Howard—both experience and therapy have proven Tony isn’t quite done trying to organize his life according to his father’s wishes—or supposed wishes—though he does the opposite of that as often as he respects his father’s legacy, if not more so. It got quite apparent in his relationship with Pepper, too. Tony loved her—still does, even—of course. He’s an ass, but he’s not that far gone, thank heaven.

Dating her, though, would have been the perfec _t mi_ x of satisfying his father—she’s smart, charming, charismatic, sensible—and making him despair—she is, after all, from a lower class family. No, it wasn’t Tony’s primary motivation which, let’s not lie, was a relief to confirm a few sessions back, but that doesn’t mean he never thought about it—or hated himself for thinking about it—even while they were dating.

 

That’s not what’s happening with Lorna, though, at least Tony doesn’t think so. With Pepper, there was always a dimension of need in their relationship, on his side more than hers. Again, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her, but it does mean Tony made decisions he probably shouldn’t have made—decisions that were definitely not fair to her.

With Lorna, for better or for worse, Howard Stark doesn’t compute—might as well not have existed at all, really. Going out with her, whether their outings are dates or not, or if they’re something in between, is actually more of a pickle in relation to the other Avengers—what would they think, after all, if they learned Tony has been spending time with their most recurring foe? They wouldn’t understand—would they even try to understand what this means to him? He’s not sure, and quite frankly he doesn’t want to risk it.

 

Part of him—a tiny, shivering part of him that doesn’t quite dare push the words out of his mouth—wonders, though, if maybe this time he’s mostly afraid of to disappoint himself.

 

{ooo}

 

He comes out of the consultation without a clear idea—or even a fuzzy one—of how he wants to handle the Lorna situation, but he does feel lighter and half-resolved to just wait and see.

He pushes his concerns at the back of his mind—not that different from what he does in ordinary situations,although this time he has to make a conscious effort for it instead of just assuming fate, in the form of Pepper and (or) Rhodey will take care of it.

 

Of course, the downside is if—when?—he fails, he’ll have no choice but to shoulder the blame for it but, he supposes, you can’t have everything.

 

He finds Lorna waiting for him on the sidewalk, messy braids tumbling over a small, three-quarters vest in gold cotton and a shiny green dress that sways in the gentle breeze. Tony’s lips curl into a smile when he notices a black feather hanging from her hair, and he compliments her for it before he asks:

 

“What are we doing today?”

“Culinary experience,” Lorna replies, the tip of her hair brushing past her shoulder blades when s _he t_ urns around without waiting to see if Tony follows.

 

He doesn’t particularly mind, and simply smiles when they teleport into a cramped space between two white stone walls blackened by time. Lorna must have messed with some kind of timeline, too, because it’s already dusk when they step out into a larget street and all but stumble on the Eiffel Tower, scintillating with white lights.

 

“Is today a holiday?” Tony asks, but Lorna shakes her head.

“It’s an hourly thing. I can’t always take you to the most spectacular times.”

 

Tony thinks of absolute silence and light coursing through his body and nods, even as he follows Lorna toward the tower. They bypass a host of tourists milling around the neatly-trimmed grass, trees planted in a straight line on either sides, and fall in line for the elvators.

It’s a pity, really, that today isn’t a holiday—Tony liked the idea, for one, and besides he feels like doing something festive with Lorna just now. He’s not sure what, or why, exactly—just that he’s in a good mood and a little giddy and, well. He might as well enjoy it.

 

Together, they wait their turn before they can climb up to the second floor and the restaurant there, called _La Tour D’Argent_. It’s posh, with an old-money feeling that Tony doesn’t see all that often, used as he is to the newest, shiniest establishments he can find. The view, perched above the Seine and the city lights coming to life, is nice though, and Tony is pleased when Lorna steers him to a tabl _e by the window._

Two men are already seated. One, clearly of Native American descent, gives a wolfish smile to the waitress, ocher skin stretching to bare sharp white teeth and a hint of gum as he readjusts the a leather vest on the back of his chair, hair as black as his eyes carefully braided at the back of his neck. Across him, cheekbones just as high but skin the darkest shade of black Tony has ever seen, the other man stretches in a blood-red suit, golden-red eyes shining under the scarification marks standing above his eyebrows. His hair, short cropped, curls tight above his skull, and when he smiles it looks almost too wide for his face.

Tony looks at the men as they bicker, apparently busy comparing a heavy silver ring and what looks like a fang on a leather cord, as if the two pieces of jewelry were even truly comparable.

 

Tony frowns as he and Lorna approach their table, something about the way red suit’s fingers move, a little too shaky—a little too fast—tickling at the edge of his brain, until the long-haired man turns his wolfish grin to him.

 

“Ah,” he says with a look of intense satisfaction, “if this isn’t my favorite atheist in the world!”

“Oh,” Tony realizes, sharp and a little embarrassed at the lateness, “Coyote? Anansi?”

“In the flesh,” Anansi says as he takes a cocktail from their waitress, “you don’t look very different from what I remember.”

 

Tony frowns at Anansi’s brief hesitation, until it occurs to him that, while they first met two weeks ago as far as he’s concerned, both gods probably took the long way back—or forward?—to the here and know. If anything, he should probably be flattered to be remembered for that long, even if he can’t help but wonder if there was anything beside his atheism that secured his spot in the others’ memories.

He doesn’t let himself dwell on the question too much—doesn’t want to open the can of worm wriggling under the desire to know what the two gods think of him—and tries to keep his expression pleasantly neutral as he sits down. At least now he knows tonight is definitely not a date, and can act accordingly. It’s easier, at least.

 

“Neither do you,” Lorna replies when Tony is a little too long to answer, “but then we didn’t exactly come here to compare wrinkles, did we?”

 

“Of course not,” Anansi agrees, “but it’s fun to tease.”

 

Lorna smiles, something dagger-sharp and flashing like a jewel, and Tony tries very hard not to think of the stories he heard of Norse Gods drinking mead from human skulls.

 

{ooo}

 

“We needed the faith that came with it,” Lorna finishes with a shrug, “that doesn’t mean we always enjoyed it.”

 

Somehow, despite Tony’s best effort to pretend there’s nothing odd about his current company—or nothing odder than usual, at least—the conversation derived from where the four of them traveled to when, and then it somehow took a dive for the frankly theological, leading tony to learn more about human sacrifices  than he ever thought he’d know.

 

“Are you kidding me?” He asks, incredulous, “You’ve got the power to create entire worlds and destroy them in the blink of an eye, and you’re trying to tell me you couldn’t refuse human sacrifices?”

“And who,” Coyote asks with an edge to his voice, “do you think created _us_?”

 

They’ve left the restaurant by now, wandering the city streets without aim, occasionally pausing to look at an interesting building or a fountain...or, in this case, for Tony to stare at Coyote like he’s just grown a second head.

 

“Who did what now?”

“Create us,” Anansi repeats with a loose shrug, posture far too relaxed for the bombshell he just released.

“I...I have no idea,” Tony admits.

 

He has, he realizes, just sort of assumed the Gods appeared one day, fully formed and potent. Who was there to create them if they created the world, after all?

 

“Humans did,” Lorna says.

 

Something brief and tight-looking flickers across Coyote and Anansi’s faces, like revealing a secret one is slightly embarrassed by...or afraid of, maybe.

 

“Human faith created us,” Lorna continues, “it shaped us. The stronger the faith, the harder it is to resist its pull—to defy its expectations. We were created in your image—we feel things the same way humans do, but at the same time—well. We do have to conform to what you are expecting to see.”

“That means,” Anansi continues when Tony fails to come up with a properly understanding expression, “that if the majority of our followers think we gain power from human sacrifices, we can’t just decide to get it from smoked pepperonis instead.”

“Oh.”

 

There isn’t much more to say—not much more to express the surprise and disbelief—in response to that, and Tony is about to leave things at that when he remembers a conversation not so long ago—a story of Asgard, and how it used to be.

 

“That’s what you meant when you talked about taking your freedom, right? You meant when people stopped believing in you.”

“Yeah,” Coyote agrees with a painful-sounding yawn, “now we can live our lies more or less as we want, so long as you remember us. If you forgot we’d be toast, but in the meantime, well. We can change things.”

 

Tony watches Lorna’s face shift through sadness, fear, relief and a warm sort of determination as Coyote speaks, eyes rimmed with a thin line of tears.

He hasn’t studied any text about Thor or any other Asgard resident—didn’t have any interest for it before, and figured he’d get the intel from the source after he met Thor. As it is, he’s got no idea what’s in store for them—how much of what he heard is in keeping with sacred texts and how much is brand new, but it doesn’t really matter.

He knows what it’s like to feel like your entire life has been scripted out for you.

On instinct, Tony loops an arm around Lorna’s shoulder and pulls her closer to him, Coyote and Anansi chuckling when it only serves to highlight their height difference in a way that, Tony can admit, probably wouldn’t look very flattering for him on a magazine cover. It’s a good thing that’s not his main concern right now.

 

He lets Lorna bend to rest her head on his shoulder, presses her closer to him, and is surprised to feel Coyote and Anansi join the improvised hug pile after a few seconds. The whole thing is a little too warm for the weather and stains his armpits with sweat, but if this is the price to pay for that kind of comfort, well.

Surprised as he is, he’s still ready to pay it.

 

{ooo}

 

Tony is practically singing when he reaches the tower—hums through his elevator ride and all but bursts into the room as soon as the doors open to let him out. Even Thor’s absence—after he left with the shortest note about family matters on Tuesday—doesn’t bother him, that’s how good his mood is. He whistles his way through the corridors, half-ready to dance in celebration of whoever knows what, until he steps in the kitchen.

 

The whole team—minus Thor—has gathered there with somber faces and solemnly squared shoulders. That, in itself, would be enough to set Tony on edge—is more than enough to raise the hair at the back of his neck—and Fury’s presence stabs at his nerves like a chainsaw on metal.

His stomach doesn’t entirely drop until he realizes Bradin-Kevin-Gavin is all but hiding in the corner, bouncing on the balls of his feet with jittery movements. That’s when panic settles in.

 

“So,” Fury says, arms crossed over his chest, “I hear you have a thing going with Loki.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment and concrit (here or [on Tumblr](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/ask)) make me want to keep writing :)


	10. Breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things are revealed, and none of them are pleasant. Also, Tony may or may not make Steve cry, but he doesn't really care about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...Tony is kind of an ass here, jsyk. He's got reasons, ones I can fully empathize here, but he's still being kinda cruel to Steve toward the end. Sorry, Steve.
> 
> **Chapter updated Sunday April 30th, 2017**

Tony stares at the therapist—is the guy even a real professional, or was he just acting?—until the world starts swimming, his ears buzzing with the same white noise that deafened him after his jeep blew up on an unnamed desert road. He watches the room swim in a strange kind of slow tango, arc reactor desperately trying to split his chest open even as he tries to make sense of Steve’s wide eyes and pale face. He fucked up—he fucked up and he’s screwed, and the thought of it is almost enough to pull him to his knees.

He reaches for Lorna’s—Loki’s, it’s Loki’s—knife in his pocket and clenches his fingers around the handle hard enough to hurt while he tries to breathe the storm out of his lung, the blankness out of his brain.

 

He hasn’t told anyone about Loki—not Pepper, who’s seen him through more shit than she should have had to, not Rhodey, who’s undoubtedly going to kill him for the omission, and with good reasons to boot. The only moment Tony even used the name—ha. He really should have guessed, shouldn’t he? Kebradalvin’s presence should have been a dead giveaway! Oh, how stupid can he get?

Months. Months of therapy, of spilling his guts out to a stranger because he thought it’d be safer than trust any of his friends with the mess of him and now—this? Well fucking done, Tony, way to prove you’re actually the idiot you thought you were.

 

“You said you weren’t keeping tabs on us anymore,” Bruce says from his seat at the very edge of the kitchen.

 

His voice is full of the same quiet challenge he’s used to coax more than one arrogant dick think of their following words with a lot of carefulness. On the side, Fury gives Bruce a wary side-eye, and Tony wants them both to shut up—to slip into silence and leave what’s left of his world alone. Hell, he’s just about ready to start praying right now—indulge the wobbliness of his knees and call for whoever happens to hear to come and get him out of this nightmare—but Fury steals the rug from under him when he says:

 

“We at S.H.I.E.L.D came to the conclusion that Iron Man’s safety required special monitoring.”

 

Tony manages to brace himself on the wall before he actually falls, but it’s a close call—and it doesn’t even really matter anyway. The room blinds him with its harsh lights, overexposed and burning at his eyes harder than the lamps thrown into his face in a darkened cave until he has to swallow against the sudden urge to vomit.

Four months—four months of his life—the thought seizes at his throat, his stomach, his chest, presses at him until he has to gasp around it, drowning in all the things he should never have said, never have confided, and he can’t make himself stop, can’t get air—

 

“Can’t breathe,” he gasps through sheer miracle, sliding halfway to the floor before Bruce springs out of his chair and stabilizes him, leaving Steve to try and open Tony’s collar.

 

Tony, meanwhile, can’t—won’t—look anywhere, at anything but Bruce—Bruce, and the way his eyes look like they’re trying to catch Tony and not let him go. Bruce, whose voice is steady and solid when he tells Tony to breath—come on, Tony, in through the nose, out through the mouth, we’ll get there.

It hurts—breathing hurts, looking hurts—but Tony wrestles himself back into some semblance of control, forces his lungs through one, two, three cycles of controlled breathing before he stops feeling like he’s about to have an out of body experience. The whole of him screams, like an exposed nerve rubbed raw, and a small part of his brain wonders if Bruce, who first used the metaphor, feels half that terrified when he hulks out.

If yes, tony is never asking the Big Guy to come out again.

 

“I have trouble believing you did this for Tony’s sake,” Bruce says after Tony calms down a little, the evenness of his tone keeping Tony anchored there.

 

Steve’s fingers hurt where they dig into his biceps. Clint and Natasha haven’t made a move either way.

 

“You don’t have to believe it,” Fury replies with a slight shrug.

 

Tony grips at Bruce’s shoulder as tight as he holds Loki’s knif _e, a_ nd _wishes one or two Norse gods would crash_ through the ceiling right now. They don’t, though, and so he clings to the tremors of anger in Bruce’s voice when he summarizes:

 

“You lied to us, breached the doctor-patient contract of privacy—if your boy here is even a real doctor—and set Tony back months in terms of personal progress, and you’re trying to tell us it was all for his sake?”

“I’ll have you know I am—”

“If you’re not a fraud you’re a piece of shit,” Bruce cuts off with uncharacteristic profanity, “either way, you’re seriously starting to annoy me.”

 

Whatshisface the maybe-therapist shuts up with a squeak and Tony—oh, Tony could kiss Bruce right now, if he weren’t too busy trying to think straight without going into another panic attack. He’s not going to prison—or wherever S.H.I.E.L.D wants to take him, that’s certain. He’s seen the kind of cage they built for Bruce. He’s seen what they think of when faced with a problem—he’s not going down without a fight.

It’s a new though, the refusal to die, but there’s no time to examine it—Tony pulls it close instead, wraps it around him like armor while Bruce—skinny, puny little Bruce with the strength of a nuke beneath his skin—continues to stare Fury down, every line of his body rigidly refusing to give Tony up.

 

“I think we’ve all noticed Stark’s abnormal behavior,” Fury says, as if he hasn’t heard Bruce’s barely-veiled threat, “and considering he’s mentioned wanting to bone a guy higher than Erik Lehnsherr on the public enemies list—”

 

Tony gags while the others gasp, mostly _because he can almost h_ ear it again—the way he wished Loki weren’t such a complicated person and—no, stop. Shut up—focus. Focus, or give yourself time to get there.

 

“I was thinking of dating actually,” he manages through the tight lump in his throat, mind racing over possibilities, “just so we’re clear.”

 

Fury twitches at the touch of sarcasm—it’s good. Piss him off, he won’t be thinking quite so well, will he? Shit, Tony was so stupid though, so naïve—for fuck’s sake Tony, focus!

 

“Do you really think it matters?” Fury asks with a raised eyebrow, “Did you think we hadn’t noticed you dropping off the radar on the regular? And your behavior hasn’t been going better—

“It’s called depression and suicidal tendencies,” Tony counters, the familiar, thin veneer of sarcasm holding him up against the thought of Fury rattling off all the ways he’s still failing.

 

If Steve’s face is anything to go by, though, it’s already too late. He steps away from Tony and Bruce, eyes wide as saucers, and while Clint and Natasha aren’t moving any more than they have since the beginning, it’s still easy to guess their surprise in the glance they share.

Think, Tony. Either Fury’s genuinely mistaken—unlikely, considering his resources and the ample evidence that Loki on a mind-controlling spree is far from being that subtle—or he’s deliberately pretending for a reason. The first problem would be easy to solve—a couple of hours, at most.

If it’s the second one, Tony needs to get out or he’ll definitely be doomed.

 

“Look,” Fury start, looking as genuinely regretful as they come, “I didn’t want to come through this, but you’re not giving me a choice. We are taking your assets into custody.”

“The Iron Man is a private property,” Bruce says, the threat in his voice more evident, you can’t—”

“It’s a private weapon,” Steve counters, kind enough to wince when two unknown agents slip into the kitchen.

 

He says something else next, but Tony’s brain doesn’t bother tracking that, caught up on Fury’s words. _We’re taking your assets into custody_. Not the suits. Not the armor. The _assets_. Dummy. Butterfingers. You.

 _Jarvis_.

 

Tony’s eyes widen as if in slow motion, and then he’s on his feet, running out of the kitchen as he shouts for Jarvis to put the tower on lockdown, Fury’s rage-filled voice roaring for the agents to catch him. Tony manages to slide one of the bulletproof doors back to the hallway, at least two or three guards slipping in after him—damn, he should have made this whole process faster.

Ten more steps, barrel past another doorway—only two guards and the horrifying sound of crushed limbs follow him into the living room. He has to slam the hidden door hidden next to the chimney into somebody’s face to delay them by a precious few seconds, and clatter down the stairs with a hurricane in his lungs.

He wishes Pepper were here—he’d make a joke about actual secret staircases and forget about the phantom weight of a car battery in his hands—but by the time he realizes she’s too far to reach he’s already in the workshop and screaming his core processor access code. _Think_ , he tells himself as he shoves the hidden panel closed behind him and locks it just in time to keep attackers out, _damage control, what would Pepper do_?

 

S.H.I.E.L.D doesn’t get Jarvis—it can’t, not ever. Tony has seen the kind of thi _ngs_ they did with only their best brains to work on it, and the thought of Jarvis’ decades of advance on any other technology in their hands sends chills down his spine. Tony has to keep him out of anyone’s reach, that much is clear—at least this way, even if he does something horrible, it’ll be on Tony’s head, and no one else. _Come on, what would Pepper do_?

Not get involved with Loki, for starters. But if she did—if she somehow took a hit to the head and got herself in that situation, with the same profound conviction that Jarvis cannot be allowed into foreign hands, well...it’s not like Tony hasn’t thought of it on his own. One step down, a couple more to go. Now, as Pepper keeps demonstrating, the key to a successful career is time management, right? Right. Let’s manage time, Tony.

 

“Jarvis,” Tony asks, fingers clenching and unclenching around Loki’s stupid knife that won’t hold its fucking promises, “how long until Fury’s goons get in there?”

“The two in the workshops are currently being kept away from the tools by the house units,” Jarvis replies with a little more trepidation to his voice than usual, “but one of their bullets is bound to hit home, eventually. Best case scenario, you have a little over ten minutes, sir.”

“Let’s assume we’re on worst case,” Tony pushes through gritted teeth.

“Two point fifty-seven minutes.”

 

Too short to try going around and grabbing a suit, even if it hadn’t been a last-ditch, ‘I don’t want to do this’ effort. Alright. Pepper’s tip to a successful life number two—prioritize. Breathing first—in, hold, out, hold, in, hold, out, hold, repeat until brain starts back. Think.

Plans. They have to go. No one but Tony could have made Jarvis, but any idiot can follow a plan. If S.H.I.E.L.D wants Jarvis, they’ll need the plans or buck _le up for t_ wenty years o _f full-time wor_ k. Hardly the takeover they’re going for.

 

“Okay,” Tony gasps, blinking moisture out of his eyes, “Jarvis, I need you to send a message to Pepper, if you can.”

“The emergency line is under attack,” Jarvis warns, “Transmission not guaranteed.”

“’Kay,” Tony croaks out, eyes closing before he can stop them.

 

Loki’s knife digs in his palm, between his fingers. His cheeks hurt, nose itching with saltwater dripping onto the tip. His lungs are only seconds from bursting, but he manages to nod when Jarvis announces he’s recording.

 

“Pepper, they’re wrong, I’m not compromised, I know I’m not, it’s—”

 

Tony forces his mouth shut when his voice wavers. Limited time. No babbling. Go.

 

“S.H.I.E.L.D wants Jarvis. Not sure why but I’m not letting them. I’m sorry—don’t leave me there!”

 

Something bangs outside Tony’s compartment—the metal is too thick for him to hear anything else, but he really hopes none of the bots is damaged beyond repair. There’s no time for a last-minute save, anyway.

God, he’s spent so many hours hunched over the little guys, poured so much of himself into their codes, their casings, their quirks and boo-boos, what’s he going to do now they’re—unavailable, he tells himself firmly. They’ll just be unavailable. For a while. They won’t even notice. They’re just—just—they won’t notice. They won’t hurt. Come on, Tony, you can do this.

 

“Sir,” Jarvis says, voice oddly gentle through the speakers, “you are running out of time.”

“I know,” Tony replies.

 

He chokes on the words a little, bumps his forehead against the walls to clear his thoughts—it works and doesn’t at the same time—and manages to produce a pitiful gargle:

 

“I’ll miss you, Jarvis.”

“Initiating Project Napoleon,” a horrendous excuse for a vocal simulator intones in a droning voice, “execution in fifty nine seconds, fifty-eight, fifty seven—”

 

A safe box opens next to Tony’s hand, a memory card barely larger than a thumbnail rattling into it for a mere second before Tony catches it and shoves his pants down his legs—

 

“—thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six—”

 

—shoves the chip and its plastic up his anus, wincing when the angles catch at the sensitive skin there and why didn’t he—why did he have to—oh, fuck, _Jarvis_ —

 

“—thirty four, thirty-three, thirty-two—”

 

—yanks the whole thing back up, holds in a scream as the first suit explodes overhead—

 

“—sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten—”

 

—zips himself up, vaguely hopes he’ll die—

 

“—nine, eight, seven, six, five, four—”

 

—closes his eyes, breathes out—

 

“—three, two, one.”

 

Acrid smoke burns at his lung with the hiss of an air-tight door opening.

 

Alarms howl to life.

 

He falls.

 

{ooo}

 

“I’m not mind-controlled,” Tony repeats for the thousandth time, forehead braced against the glass wall of his cell, “Fury’s lying.”

 

On the other side, Steve looks at him with infinite sadness, the kind that says he wishes he could believe the lovely lie he’s being offered but will face the truth for a friend’s sake. The irony is not lost on Tony, and he sorts of wants to smash the expression off with a crowbar.

 

“He’s made an enemy to the Avengers when he tried to take your suits,” Steve points out, “and he knows it.”

“And yet you’re still with him,” Tony replies, too tired to put much venom into it.

“It’s too stupid a move to be a conspiracy, Tony,” Steve insists, infuriatingly gentle though it all.

 

Tony hasn’t slept or sat down since he woke up here about five hours ago, which he figures explains why he can’t even bring himself to shake his head. He doesn’t even know if this is a Steve thing or a forties thing, clinging to the possibility of brain washing, but it hardly matters. He doesn’t have any way to prove this—not when they’re all working under the assumption that he’ll try and lie his way out of this mess.

They’ve been around, the lot of them. Fury, to inform him Clint got freed by a solid knock to the head, but S.H.I.E.L.D is willing to try softer treatments. Clint and Natasha snuck in—or so their poses seemed to say—to make sure his cell was as nice as a bare, sheets-free bed and the chrome equivalent of a hole in the ground can be... and Bruce, telling him the blood samples he’d taken of all of them for study purposes have gone missing.

And Steve, presumably to assess the damage by himself, like he always does.

 

Too bad he’s inflicting most of it at the moment.

 

“I’m not mind-controlled,” Tony repeats after a long silence,idly wishing he had bars to rest his arms on, “I’ve been hanging out with Loki for four months. If he really were controlling me it’d be one hell of a long-term game.”

 

A shit strategy, too. What do they all think, that Tony was gonna join the dark side out of pity? Please. Loki probably knows better than try that—should know better, in any case. Tony would tell Fury as much, really, if it didn’t somehow feel like betraying someone—Loki or himself, that’s still a mystery, but betrayal is betrayal, regardless.

Besides, what could he say? ‘It’s not mind-control if he spills his git as much as I do’? Best case scenario, someone would try to use that as a way to get more intel and, well. Friend. Or at least, from where Tony’s standing there’s friendship.

Loki’s radio silence doesn’t exactly say good things about where Tony stands on his priority list.

 

“Maybe he’s already got what he wanted,” Steve replies, “and he’s keeping you on a leash because you’re a valuable asset.”

“I didn’t take the samples,” T _ony s_ ighs, weary of that non-conversation already.

 

Bruce said the safe was broken into, though the means are still to be determined. If anything, Tony likes to think he’d be smarter about covering his tracks, even under mind control. Besides, from what he’s seen of Loki, he doesn’t seem the type to hold onto useless things unless they’ve got some form of sentimental value, but well. It’s not like saying that would make his situation any better. Worst case scenario, people are going to assume he’s Loki’s accomplice, anyway.

 

“Honestly, the guy managed to play Thor’s all-seeing bodyguard. Wouldn’t he be a little more subtle about theft?”

 

Not that Loki has a big history of subtlety in this world, but still. There’s showy, and then there’s stupid.

 

“Tony,” Steve sighs, disgustingly weary for someone who isn’t in a cell, “are you trying to imply somebody is using you to frame Loki?”

 

It’s ridiculous, Tony knows—that’s the only thing keeping him from saying yes. Still, he’s been thinking and over-thinking this thing through for the past five hours, and everything else makes even less sense. He can’t be the prime target of this stint—not when S.H.I.E.L.D as personified by Fury recovered so well from Jarvis’ los _s._ Not when everyone is still firmly blaming Loki for this debacle...not with the battery of tests, some of which he’s imagined himself, looking for magic he’s been subjected to. So, given that he isn’t dead or being taunted with the news coverage that his fall would generate, Tony is pretty sure he’s not the main objective.

The question is, who would frame Loki, and why?

Tony as a proxy sort of makes sense—he’s big, with enough resources to be a threat if compromised—but Loki already tried to conquer the planet, it’s hard to make himself more undesirable than that. Whoever is behind this, whether it’s Fury—impossible to dismiss, although something about the idea feels off—or someone else entirely, they were clearly hoping for Jarvis as a neat bonus prize. They failed, thanks to Tony’s Afghanistan-born paranoia, but that doesn’t change anything to it.

None of that solves the question of why though, and Steve seems to take Tony’s silence as a confession of guilt because he sighs and says:

 

“See? Even you can’t come up with a reasonable reason for us to trust you.”

“I kind of thought trust came with the ‘friends’ territory,” Tony hisses before he goes for the belt: “either I got some funny idea about us being friend or that guy Bucky wasn’t the man I thought he was.”

“Bucky didn’t try to kill himself!” Steve roars, angry snarl stopping inches away from the glass, “he didn’t suddenly decide his friends couldn’t be trusted with anything and start giving them the slip whenever he couldn’t be arsed to deal with his problems! And he certainly didn’t go from hating the enemy’s gut to pretending they were good guys in four months’ time!”

“I’m not saying he’s a good guy, I’m saying he’s not doing anything to me right now!” Tony protests, voice rising dangerously close to a yell.

 

 _Don’t do anything stupid,_ he tells himself, fingers clenching into fists against the glass, _don’t go there._

 

“Right,” Steve says, voice tight and body taut, “because you’d know that.”

“I’d at least hope you guys could see I’m still using my brain!”

“Are you?”

 

Steve’s gaze pointedly goes to Tony’s wrist, and Tony surprises himself when he pounds on the glass hard enough to feel something give under the skin. Steve gives him a shocked puppy look, like he’d only been saying the most reasonable thing, like there’s no reason for fury to tear at Tony’s temples—his ribs, his palms—until the world drowns into a sea of red.

 

“Oh, of course,” Tony hisses, barely more than a breath between the two of them, “of course you’d think I’m stupid for it—”

“I didn’t say—”

“Yes you did!” Tony cuts off, bile burning at his throat like poison, “Stupid Tony Stark, with his money and his name and his brain who builds things no one else could dream of and still finds ways to try and die! Useless Tony Stark, who could do so much for the world and gets drunk and parties instead—don’t you think I’ve heard it all by now? Don’t you think I know that?”

“Tony, I wasn’t—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Rogers!”

 

Steve’s face falls, and Tony should stop, should be ashamed and hate himself— _will_ be ashamed and hate himself soon enough—but for now he’s hurting as much as he’s ever hurt, and he’s taken it in silence long enough damnit! He’s taken it all in—the punches, the disdain, the reproaches, and fuck they’ve hurt, but to have them fall from _Captain America’s_ mouth? From the same guy he’s admired and hated since he was old enough to remember?

Well, there had to be a last straw at some point.

 

“I’m a screwed up, useless piece of shit of a failure, don’t you see that? We’re not all like you—we can’t all be America’s golden boy, the poster child for everything good and righteous on this earth—some of us are just useless messes, that’s how it is! You want a lie? You want a facade? Try the guy you thought I was b _efore this whole debacle! God, R_ ogers, why do you think I wanted to die?”

“Tony, you didn’t really—”

“Oh yes I did!” Tony hisses, voice dropping almost to a whisper, a thin sliver of poison he can almost feel drifting out of his body and into Steve’s ears, “believe me, I wanted to—haven’t you heard the docs? Five minutes later and I was done for, and that was the _goal_. But of course,” Tony continues in a more regular volume, “you don’t see that. You don’t believe that. How could you, you perfect, self-righteous ass? You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering if anybody would ever miss you, do you? I bet you’ve never even doubted you had anything to offer the world, have you? You have no idea what it feels like to be me.”

“Tony,” Steve tries again, eyes shining as his face crumbles, “I didn’t mean to—”

“You know I hate you, right?” Tony asks, voice rising with every word, “I tried to hide it—I tried to be a good teammate, a good friend, even, ha! Like I’d ever be worth that! But I hate you, Rogers. I’ve spent my entire life listening to the world rant about how perfect, how chivalrous, how painfully golden you were—all my life. Gods, the hours Howard spent looking for you, talking about you—the house was a fucking museum, your name never to be spoken in vain, and I spent so much time trying to beat you, trying to be better than you—I should have known it was a lost fight from the start! How dumb can I get, right? And the worst part is—the worst part is you—you’re—you! You don’t even have the decency to just be a random schmuck with lab-grown muscles, no! You have to go and live up to the legend! Smile at kittens, never cries, always right mister Rogers, prancing around like a gift from God while the rest of us just—just—”

 

Tony turns away from Steve with a strangled cry of anger and frustration, hands flailing aimlessly at his side. He wants to break something—smash a vase, rip sheets apart, kick the toilets until he dents the metal, scream into a pillow all at t he same time but somehow, all of it seems so—so—stupid, and over dramatic, and Tony just—just—

 

“Tony, no!” Steve yells when Tony hits his forehead with the butt of his hand for the first time, “stop! Don’t do that!”

 

Tony doesn’t stop, hitting at his forehead again and again until a piercing headache settles in his skull for the long haul. There’s just—there’s too much. It’s all too much. The pain, the anger, the hatred, the frustration, and now Steve—what the fuck is Tony supposed to do with this? Be patient? Be understanding? Be kind? When was the world ever kind to him?

Yeah, sure, they’re the accident of birth—there’s the money, and the girls—but there’s the loneliness and despair too, there’s the betrayals and the attempted murders, and there’s the gnawing pit of emptiness inside, where he knows even Pepper and Rhodey can’t reach because they’re trying—bless their souls, they’ve been trying so hard—but Tony is just far too fucked up for it to work! And really how is any of it fair? Is that what he gets for being born filthy rich? Is that it? Some kind of cosmic punishment saying he can have one but not the other, that if he’s going to go through life not knowing what it’s like to worry about money he’s damned well gonna know what it’s like to watch everyone he loves leave though his own faults?

 

“Please, Tony,” Steve tries again when Tony’s hands reach for his face and settle there, as if he could make the world disappear just by not seeing it, “you don’t have to do that. This isn’t—”

“Get out,” Tony tells him, voice muffled by his fingers.

“Tony, I’m trying to—”

“Just get out. Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you.”

 

There’s a quiet gasp and a shuffle of feet, like Steve is about to protest again, but Tony doesn’t have it in him to ask ag _ain. He w_ ipes his face instead, more surprised than he should be to find it wet, and makes his way over to the bed.

His brain feels like it’s banging at the edges of his skull when he faceplants into the mattress, the pain sharp and pointed as a knife, but he doesn’t care. He’ll hate his words—hate himself for them—soon enough, maybe. If he’s good enough a man for that. For now, the whole thing feels mostly like he’s drawn all the pus from a wound—not lighter exactly, not better by a long shot, but still feeling like it’s a first step of healing.

 

Steve leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and reviews make me want to keep writing! Here, or on [Tumblr](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/ask)


	11. Cell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things suck a lot, but at least it gives Tony time to think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **EDIT:** Chapter rewrite updated June 5, 2017.

_Tony’s legs scream with protest when he speeds up, the battery in his arms dragging him down and tearing at the edges of his skin with agonizing slowness. He trips on a swiss knife hidden in the desert sand, and plummets down toward New York._

 

Tony startles awake with a gasp, wincing when the harsh light of his cell pierces at his eyes. He screws his eyes shut and waits for a few careful seconds before he tries again—the light still sort of stings, but it’s bearable now, and Tony sighs. He scans the glass wall for his guard’s position—she’s about on the opposite side of him—and makes a show of yawning and stretching so he can shove his hands under his pillow in a way that won’t make him look suspicious.

Loki’s knife is still here.

 

He thought it was a trap, at first. It was in his pocket when he was taken, that’s true, but somewhere between his fight with Steve and the moment he woke up for the second time, Fury’s goons changed him into something achingly similar to hospital scrubs. It took Tony a couple of seconds to notice it when he first woke up, but the panic attack was almost instantaneous. Who knew what else had happened while he slept, right?

The chip turned out to still be in place though, digging against his insides as soon as he got up to pace, which was a relief in more ways than one. First of all: the chip is still there. His most precious possession, and it’s not lost. Second, its presence meant no rectal search, X-rays, or deep searching procedure was used on him. Good news for his body integrity, and an argument against the knife’s presence being a trap, which was useful to cling to when Tony found it under his pillow as he shoved his face in it to hide his relief.

 

Logically speaking, S.H.I.E.L.D can’t possibly be unaware of its existence. It was right there in his pants pockets . There’s no way nobody noticed it.

Question is: why put it in his cell? Fury has ostensibly taken precautions against suicidal tendencies—irritatingly impractical precautions, but still. Why would he get a knife in Tony’s cell when it runs contrary to his official motives and would lead at least to some silent questions in whoever was tasked to put the knife back under Tony’s pillow...unless Fury placed it himself, but that would still be a stupidly risky move.

 

(The more optimistic part of him keeps bumping on the idea that there is a spell on the knife, but Tony’s been listening to his guards talk as they rotate. No sign of Loki anywhere since Tony was put into forced custody. Not exactly reassuring.)

 

Loki isn’t the only topic of conversation in the prison, though. Hearing the guards talk about the aftereffects of Jarvis’ and other various Stark-owned servers demise is...well, it’s painful, really, because Jarvis is gone, but it’s also a little vindicative. There’s something satisfying about knowing you’ve made you captor’s life a little more difficult, even if it’s just by forcing them to go back to books instead of the internet for information.

Besides, thinking about Jarvis is painful, but it keeps his mind off the sobriety.

 

Truthfully, the sobriety itself wouldn’t be a problem, quite the contrary. But between the stress, the lack of sleep, and the general upending of his life, Tony has been itching for a drink for days. What he assumes are days.

It’s not a physical ache—apparently, he’s either slowed the drinking down enough since his suicide attempt to avoid that, or he’s just a lucky bastard in that respect—but it itches and scratches at his brain, like a sick sort of Jimminy Cricket trying to convince him his life would be a lot better with a glass in his hand. Tony knows it’s a lie, of course, but that doesn’t mean he’s not tempted anyway.

 

He’s kept himself busy so far, alternating between mourning Jarvis and trying to think of an escape plan—anything to either gain contact with the outside world or get himself out—but event that is getting harder as time passes and offers no new solution.

There are at least two security cameras in his cell, on top of the one outside that faces the glass wall. His guards have irregular shift changes—as far as he can judge without real mean of measuring time—and so far there hasn’t been a single repeating face. Tony got hopeful, at first, when it seemed there was a sizable blind spot in the surveillance system above his bed, but knowing Fury the thing might as well be here on purpose to lure him into a false sense of safety.

(The thought rings strangely hollow, like a decayed tooth, but Tony hasn’t been able to put his finger on why yet.)

 

Even leaving aside the fog of alcohol craving battering at his brain, Tony’s situation would be enough to numb anyone’s mind, and thinking about his allies—or lack thereof—from outside doesn’t help all that much.

Steve has apparently bought Fury’s story in full. Bruce probably hasn’t, but his options are limited at the best of times, and this is definitely not the best of times. Clint and Natasha are as much of a mystery as ever, mainly because Tony hasn’t seen or heard from them since this whole ordeal began, and has no way of knowing if it’s because they don’t care or because they decided to make a run for it. If she got his message, Pepper is probably trying to help, if she even can. If she believed him. Hopefully. Rhodey might try and lend a hand but what can he do from his camp? Not much is what. The two of them have moved mountains before, but S.H.I.E.L.D. is kind of a Mount Everest in and of itself, nothing says it’ll let itself be moved.

So all in all, Tony is on his own, whip a plastic box in his ass that’s getting increasingly difficult to ignore, an enchanted swiss knife that has yet to be useful in any way, and the vague hope that one of two Norse gods will not only get his butt back to New York but also care enough about him to risk capture and bust him out.

 

Well, that, and the mother of all alcohol cravings, but he’s trying not to think too hard about that one.

 

He paces instead, listing the people he can’t count on or hope for help from as he counts how many steps he can take in his cell and tries not to scratch at the itching patch over his arms. The need keeps growing though, presses at his chest and whispering terrible things in his ears. ‘What’s going on outside?’ it asks—Tony comes up with dozens of possible answers, all more terrible than the one that came before, and when he reaches the end of his reasoning, which is that none of this would have happened without him and he should probably refrain from doing anything in the future lest he ruins someone else’s life, the temptation is back.

 

Just one glass. Just to take the edge off. Just to forget the smear campaign Fury is probably waging against him right this minute.

 

Damn, he needs to get out of here. He needs to drink something, too, but he needs to get out of here first, and then clear Iron Man’s name. The company has Pepper now, it’ll survive, and so will Howard’s legacy—the parts Tony hasn’t trampled on already, that is. As for his own person, eh. It’s not that important. But Iron Man? It has to come back. It gives hope to too many people—Tony himself included. He can’t let it die like that, not when it is undoubtedly the best thing he’s ever made.

So, he needs to get out of here. That means he needs to focus—he needs a way to shut down the craving, and keep his head as clear as possible. Failing that, he needs to figure out how not to go too crazy until he either gets rescued or finds a way to get out.

Problem is, there doesn’t seem to be one.

 

{ooo}

 

He’s just about ready to burst out of his own skin when the realization comes that he’s been sitting on an _enchanted_ knife this whole time—he resists the urge to slap his forehead and draw attention to himself before he leaves the corner of the room he’d settled in and goes back to the bed with a fake yawn.

Slowly, trying his best to look like a man getting ready to sleep, he settles down on his side, with his arms safely tucked into the cameras blind spot. If Fury does know about the knife—there’s no way he doesn’t, but at the same time, if he did, why would the knife even be _here_?—Tony acting like he thinks he’s got a secret to keep can’t hurt, right? Besides, it would feel weird, doing that in plain view.

 

He’s not sure he’s supposed to feel that relieved when he cuts the first line into the flesh of his forearm.

 

{ooo}

 

_The pocket knife lies, forgotten, by their side as Tony feeds Pepper a slice of strawberry. She bites into it and her face starts melting off her bones, and Tony stands there, paralyzed by terror as she reaches for his throat and starts choking him._

 

Tony wakes up with a start, to a hand pressing at his throat—he throws his fist in the air before he thinks about it in full and hears someone grunt when he makes contact with thin flesh over bones. The hand on his throat leaves, and before Tony manages to wake up in full both of his wrists are tied to the bed, and he ends up staring into Clint’s pinched-neutral face. He bends down next to the bed—Tony contorts to try and see what he’s doing, but he’s bound in a way that makes that impossible—and comes back up with a pitcher full of what is definitely alcohol. The strong kind.

A noise of protest escapes Tony’s throat before he even thinks of making it, and he pulls against his restraints when Clint takes a step closer to the bed.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says while Tony clenches his teeth together, “but against Loki’s hold it’s this or a blow to the head, and this is less risky.”

 

Tony doesn’t make the mistake of saying he’d rather take the blow to the head. Either he’d get it, or Clint would use the occasion to shove the alcohol at him, neither of which are things Tony wants. He sinks into the bed, pushes himself deeper into the mattress, and tries to muster anger when Clint’s features shift to sympathy over him—but it doesn’t come, kept at bay by the sick burn of terror at the pit of Tony’s stomach, and the damn manacles that won’t give even an inch—

 

“It’ll hurt less if you just take it,” Clint says, resigned. Then, when Tony doesn’t manage a sarcastic quip, he sighs and says: “Stark. I don’t wanna make this any shittier for you than it already is.”

 

Tony sags back against the bed almost against his will, the fight evaporating out of him faster than he’d have thought possible. He doesn’t cooperate exactly—leaves Clint with the task of raising his head to the brim of the pitcher—but he doesn’t struggle either, and opens his mouth with the liquid—vodka, it soon appears—touches his lips. What’s the point in struggling, anyway? Like Clint said, it’s not like it’ll change much to the end result.

It does come as a surprise when Clint angles away from the surveillance cameras and whisper-grunts:

 

“We got new weapons today. Shiny, Hydra-issued relics for everyone.”

 

In his surprise, Tony swallows wrong and starts coughing on the vodka—Clint upend the last quarter of the pitcher on the pillow as he straightens up, gives Tony impressively terse well wishes, and takes the manacles out in practiced gestures before he exits the room.

Tony, who knows better than try and move fast after drinking that much in one go, thinks he hears Clint say something about truth and mashed potatoes before the shocked buzzing in his ears overpowers the rest of the world.

 

{ooo}

 

When Tony wakes up, dried drool pulls at his cheek, and a part of him is grimly amused to realize his hangover doesn’t seem to be that bad yet. Might grow worse fast, but he’s still a lot more functional than he expected himself to be, even as his skull makes a decent impression of being an echo chamber for a drill concerto in hammer minor. He turns to his side and lets his head hang over the side of the bed for a while anyway, just in case he needs to evacuate something fast. Then, when it seems like he’s not going to vomit just yet—a little surprising, but not unwelcome—Tony opens his eyes.

 

He’s not coherent enough to think yet—his mind stays focused on the terrible taste in his mouth, an eerily vampire-like distaste for light and _ow_. Mostly the _ow_ part. Through it all, though, something stirs in his memory when he finally understands that the mushy thing on a tray under his nose are mashed potatoes. There was something about mashed potatoes—Clint said—he said—damn it. It’s right there, right at the tip of Tony’s tongue—or his thoughts, whichever—but he can’t seem to grasp it, like he’s a cat running after a laser, and _someone’s_ keeping the red dot just out of his reach...he’s going to have to clear his mind if he wants to do anything productive. With a grunt, Tony rolls back onto the bed and, tucking his hands under the pillow, he fumbles with the knife until he can open the blade and run the tip of his fingers over the metal.

The pain probably shouldn’t feel like this. It doesn’t just cut—ha—through the fog in his mind it also makes things less...intense, somehow. Like Tony was about to explode with too much to think about, too much to feel about, and the cuts are letting some of it out and allowing him to go back to regularly scheduled existence. It’s odd and unfamiliar and a small, worried part of him wonders if he’ll keep doing this, later. If he’ll have to explain odd scars and habits, if he’ll lose people over it.

Most of him feels relieved.

 

Pressing his fingers against the pillow to stop the worst of the bleeding—he really should have picked a better place to cut—Tony tries to remember what Clint said about the potatoes exactly. The words are a blur—will probably pop back into existence way too late to be useful, if Tony’s current luck is anything to go by—but the urgency and stress in the words is easy to remember. Whatever it was, Clint wanted Tony to remember it.

Problem is, Clint is still a spy. Even waddling through a hangover—the only thing keeping his craving at bay—Tony still realizes the man is paid to double cross people on a regular basis. Who’s to say that’s not what he was doing...whenever the vodka episode was? Sure, he also mentioned Nazi superweapons coming out of storage when they were supposed to be destroyed. That’s probably not something Fury would want Tony to know. None of that means Clint isn’t trying to lure Tony into a trap.

 

 _Let’s assume,_ Tony tells himself, _that Clint was telling the truth._ The assumption is probably going to come back and bite him in the ass but, well. He has to believe some things can turn out well, doesn’t he? Yeah, he does. Anyway.

If Clint was telling the truth—if Fury really was stupid enough to outfit his organization with Hydra’s old weapons in the middle of a trust crisis—it lends credence to the possibility of someone using Tony to frame Loki. This is, after all, a blatantly stupid move, certain to raise at least some questions, right? And Fury doesn’t usually do that, even when extremely pressed. Combine that with the apparent weak spot in the surveillance—Tony could have missed a camera, somewhere, that’s true. Even so, the idea of a blind spot in the videos, even a fake one, doesn’t sound quite right. Not when you add the non-discovery of his chip on top of it, not when he’s been hiding a knife and bloody scars from S.H.I.E.L.D. like they’re regular people and not highly trained super spies.

So, Fury might actually be manipulated, probably to get at Loki.

 

Question is, who on Earth would be crazy and smart enough to do that?

 

Tony grunts, pressing his fingertips harder against the pillow, increasing the pain to keep his mind out of the fog and off the strengthening need for another drink. If he stops thinking now, he’s never going to get to the end of that reasoning, and that is not something he can afford. So, theoretical framework: Fury is being manipulated by someone who has the smarts to trump him and the resources to silence embarrassing questions inside S.H.I.E.L.D. That someone, for some reason, is trying to make Loki sound even worse—but somehow, dumber—than he really is. This can give way to at least three different interpretations.

One, Loki knows what’s happening, and he doesn’t care enough about Tony to help him. Sure, Coyote and Anansi sounded like rather close friends—the kind you introduce people who count to—but then again Loki has been entirely unheard of since the beginning of this clusterfuck. Including after fairly extensive use of a knife that’s supposed to alert him if Tony hurts himself. Emotionally speaking, Tony is already about three quarters of the way in believing that one entirely, but he still needs to consider the other two, just to be sure.

The second option is that Loki knows what’s happening, but he’s bidding his time before he intervenes, for reasons Tony doesn’t have the energy to guess at. The thought of being worth planning and waiting for is...well, it’s not unpleasant. However, that implies whoever is behind this is impressive enough to make Loki cautious, and that, on the other hand, is not pleasant _at all_.

Third—and last that Tony can think of—Loki doesn’t know what’s going on. Depending on when he slipped off the surface of the Earth, he might not have heard about this. Plus, since Thor is also MIA, there’s always the possibility that they’re locked in some kind of intergalactic siblings war somewhere and forgot anything exists outside of it. Tony thinks he knows both of the gods well enough, by now, to asses that as a perfectly valid theory.

 

Common point between all these theories: there’s nothing to expect from Loki’s side. Not for a while, at least. Meaning Tony’s escape plans are back to square one: hope Pepper—and maybe Rhodey, and maybe Clint—figures out a way to help him.

In the meantime...oh, who’s he kidding? It’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t end up begging for a drink before the end of the day. If it’s even day time—honestly, he has no idea. There’s nothing he can do, no one he can call—nothing but think back on easier times and hope things will go for the best.

 

In the midst of wishing for a drink he knows he can’t afford to ask for, Tony suddenly find himself wishing for Lorna.

 

She might have been a lie. There is, after all, a small possibility that Fury is in the right, and Tony is just imagining the conspiracy theory to escape a painful truth. If he believes that, howeve _r—_ if he does anything more drastic than pretending Lorna wasn’t Loki at all—there’s nothing left for him. If he assumes Lorna was a lie, his main support becomes nothing more than a shadow.

If he believes that, there’s really not much point in fighting anything at all anymore, really.

 

{ooo}

 

_The strings around Fury’s wrists and ankles are hard to see—they’re almost translucent, only shining when the light hits them right. The blue silhouette though—the one that pulls the strings—is easy to see, and Tony flees from it with supernatural speed. The swiss knife lies in the grass when he rounds a corner, and Tony dives for it._

 

Ice water to the face never becomes less of a horrible way to wake up, and Tony doesn’t hold back his spluttering, let alone his curses as he tries to shake some of it off his head. His brain bangs around the sides of his skull as a result, and Tony has to stop or get sick right here and now.

Nick Fury, sitting at the foot of the bed, doesn’t move during any of this. In fact, once Tony gathers enough wits to properly look at him, he looks no different from the man who tried to recruit Iron Man in a donut hole. Behind him a stranger—short, stocky, Greek or Italian-looking, with a caducei hanging from his left ear and wiry muscles clearly visible under his long-sleeved shirt—is trying very hard to be unnoticeable. He’s kind of failing, but that might be because Tony is developing a new helping of healthy paranoia.

 

“We’re still without news from Thor,” Fury says before Tony can ask about the newcomer.

 

A wince, and then Tony reaches for the familiar mask of self-assured unconcern he’s used most of his life and says:

 

“Sorry, haven’t managed to check my texts lately.”

 

Fury’s irritated silence gives Tony an excuse to shift in place and land on his pillow, acutely aware of how Loki’s knife and his own chip dig into his flesh with painful angles. At least that way, there’s no risk anything is going to slip out of its hiding place at the worst possible moment.

 

“We need to locate him, Stark,” Fury explains after a long, searching look at Tony’s face, “if you’re compromised, Thor might be as well. We need to make sure he’s still safe.”

 

Tony barely holds his snort in at that, but something of it must show on his face, because Fury frowns. That should be worrying, maybe, but the last vestiges of Tony’s hangover must have vanished during his surprise nap because the only thing he can bring himself to care about at this point is the overwhelming urge to drink, and the absolute certitude that he can not ask for any alcohol right now.

He stays silent for a long moment—both Fury and his brand new shadow wait him out, but after a handful of seconds have gone by, Fury’s eyes dart t o the tray of mashed potatoes by Tony’s bed. The untouched tray. And just like that, Tony remembers what Clint said.

 

_There’s truth serum in the potatoes._

 

Had Tony known that, he’d have at least tried to fake eating some of it. It might have been enough to keep Fury off his case for a while. As it is, he can’t do much except hope his sudden realization didn’t show, and Fury will think not eating anything was an accident.

 

“Look,” Tony says after a while, mostly so he can appear a little more cooperative, “I have no idea where either of them is. Even if I did, I’m not sure it’d have helped.”

 

Fury doesn’t look at the potatoes again—too much of a professional for a second slip up. Usually, too much of a pro for the first one, but the more Tony thinks about this, the more convinced he is that Fury isn’t quite in his right mind. Nevertheless, the more he can keep to himself, the better. He’ll have time to figure things out later.

 

“Do you have any way to contact them?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Tony answers without missing a beat.

“And neither of them contacted you?”

“No.”

 

Both of Tony’s visitors frown at that, and he has to refrain from smirking at the sight. They were probably hoping for something more useful—or for Tony to sound a little more dejected, maybe? But Tony doesn’t have any useful answer to that question, even if he wanted to help them. Not that he wants to—he would love to be lying through his teeth right now.

Unfortunately, he’s pretty sure he’s been here at least three days by now, and Loki has yet to be heard from.

 

“For your sake,” Fury says, sounding irritatingly—and worryingly—sincere, “I hope we find them soon. I’m starting to think this might be the only way to get Loki out of your head.”

 

Tony tries not to gape as he watches the two men rise and walk out of the cell.

He’s been talking with Fury for a while now, long enough that he’s seen the man express a fairly varied range of emotions—irritation, exasperation, fatigue, anger, and the occasional bout of disbelief at Tony’s more childish behaviors. Up until now, concern has never been one of them.

It’s not just concern, either—there was an undertone of determination there, not unlike the way Steve sounds when he starts on yet another crazy mission to do The Right Thing no matter the cost. What the blatant slip in control means exactly is difficult to parse—it would probably require a more personal knowledge of Fury—but Tony is fairly sure it doesn’t herald anything good for him.

 

Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Tony lies back down on the bed, hands behind his head, and closes his eyes. He replays the conversation in his head over and over again, gives himself another dozen play-by-plays of his reasoning, tries even the silliest theory he can come up with, but none of it seems to make any kind of sense, even a strange one and, after what feels like a few hours of useless questioning, Tony decides to let go of his dignity.

 

_I don’t know if it’s gonna work, but Loki if you could lend a hand here—_

 

“Well,” Loki says in an openly exasperated tone, “it took you long enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and reviews make me want to keep writing ;)


	12. Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a rescue party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Edit:** Updated Sun. August 13, 2017.

Tony stares into the abrupt darkness with his heart hammering against his ribs until a green and gold flame, no bigger than a thumb, whispers to life. The light flickers over Loki’s face, makes his features handsome, childish and fearsome in turn, a thousand faces birthed and killed by a thousand tricks of lights.

It makes Tony’s head swim.

Loki, apparently unbothered, sends the flame hovering a little above his head and lights another one, then another and another, until several dozens of small fires float in the air around them, casting their light over Loki and deepening the pitch blackness around him.

 

“You look like the Boogeyman,” Tony blurts out through the wild rhythm of his breathing, twisting his fingers into his sheets, just to make sure the bed is still there.

 

The whole scene looks and feels a little like the Big Bang did, except there’s neither scientific wonder nor any sense of emotional closeness to keep Tony calm, and sweat starts prickling at his brow long before Loki shrugs and deadpans:

 

“Well I did do a bit of interim for him.”

 

Tony gapes, unable to tell whether this is supposed to be a joke or not, until his eyes catch on to a slightly-less-dark rectangle in the blackness behind Loki. He twists around a little, careful to keep his movements limited to the approximate area of the bed, until he catches sight of something moving in the rectangle, like black heavy fog trying to hide paler silhouettes. Tony thinks they look like trees, but they’re too pale to be real.

 

“Where are we?” He asks at last, struggling to tear his attention off the door and onto Loki.

“I suppose you could say we’re technically both in you cell. This is your mind. Well, a possible manifestation of it, at least.”

“A physical manifestation of—wait, I’m dreaming?”

“In technical terms,” Loki corrects with impossibly precise enunciation, “you are being Visited.”

“Oh right,” Tony retorts, switching from surprise to sarcasm almost before he has time to decide on it, “and you couldn’t ‘visit me’ before because…?”

“You didn’t pick up the knife.”

 

Tony’s fac e flushes red in less time than it takes to blink. What does the fucking knife even have to do with anything? And what the fuck does Loki mean, Tony didn’t pick it up? He spent literal days cutting into his arm with that stupid fucking thing, and Loki has the gall to blame him for not picking it up?

Worse, still! The bastard looks sad! Hurt, even! Like he’s the one who suffered instead of Tony! Oh, what a fucking joke, what a bastard—a week! A full week, at least, in custody, all but tortured into drinking, not knowing when he’d come out and that’s what—oh, what a fucking moron Tony was.

 

“Oh, forgive me your highness,” he hisses, trying not to choke on his fury, “I guess I’m not smart enough for princely mind games, after all!”

“That’s not what I said,” Loki replies in a neutral tone, one eyebrow raising with so much elegance Tony wants to punch it open, “I’m simply saying—”

“You’re saying bull, is what you’re doing. I picked your damn knife up! For nothing! I’ve been calling you for help—”

“I’m actually fairly certain you were punishing yourself,” Loki replies, drawing his head back like an offended bird.

“You told me there was a spell in it—that you’d know if I tried to use it on myself—why d’you think I went back to cutting? The aesthetics?”

“Contrary to what you seem to believe, I didn’t actually get inside your head until about a minute ago. I knew you were cutting, not why.”

“Oh, right, because that makes everything so much better!”

 

Tony is all but kneeling on the bed by now, body tense and boiling with the urge to start throwing punches. He’s not even picky about where: face, chest, legs, anywhere it’ll take so long as it gets Loki begging for forgiveness and the ugly mess of Tony’s memories out of his brain forever.

Loki doesn’t seem to care, if he even notices at all.

 

“It doesn’t,” he says with a slight shrug, “you had to call for me. I planted the knife as a dream because I knew you were too stubborn to—”

“What? Too stubborn to die like you planned?”

 

Technically, there’s no wall to stop him here, no ground to slam into, which is probably the only reason why flying off and landing in an undignified heap doesn’t physically hurt. The gesture still reels him though, pulls his thoughts into a sharp sideway twist.

Fuck, he wishes it’d hurt though. Wishes it’d bleed like a proper wound so he could just stitch it up and be done with it instead of having to watch himself fester down into nothing. It’d be a bitch to go through but it’d be clean. Straightforward.

Simple.

 

God, he misses simple.

 

But it doesn’t hurt.

 

Loki’s face though, that gets something out of Tony, because he looks hurt. He looks like he’s hurt and betrayed, like Tony should commiserate with the poor widdle god of trickery and lies' regrets at sending a so-called friend flying. Like Tony should be craddling his cheek and say ‘it’s alright, you’re not really an asshole for trying to throw me into concrete, or whatever you thought would stop me mid-flight’.

Fuck that game. Tony’s most definitely not playing it.

 

“If I’d meant for you to die,” Loki hisses after a long, shivering pause, “all I had to do was leave you here. I could have killed you a dozen times as Lorna. Better still, I could have ignored your letter and let you do the bloody job for me, you pathetic coward!”

 

The lights around them burn brighter with each word, swelling with Loki’s venom and turning his hair from black to a bright copper, drawing lines of runes onto his face. Tony watches the change proceed with sick fascination, blood humming in his veins as Loki’s ordinary black leather shifts into thick winter gear, his chin colors with a thick copper beard where the runes come and go like words on the wind.

It fills something primal in Tony, like he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t have access to, and there’s the beginning of a punch building up in his fist when Loki strides up to him, seizes him by the collar and hisses into his face:

 

“You’re a lucky coward, though, I do not intend to let you die. Be ready for an escape tomorrow. You will know when the time comes.”

 

Tony does punch then, as hard and fast as he can manage, satisfaction blooming into his chest when he hears Loki’s nose crack and spots blood dripping onto the elegant mustache. Fuck him. Fuck him and his mysticism, his arrogance, his every fucking thing! If he wants to think he’s above everyone, fine! But if he thinks Tony’s gonna lie down and take it in silence, he’s got another fucking thing coming.

His thing with Lorna might have worked wonder, but Tony is sure as hell not about to take another one of his lies, fuck him very much.

 

“Lorna was a lie, that much is true,” Loki says while he dabs elegant fingers under his nose, “but it wasn’t mine.”

 

He’s out of the door before Tony can try to punch him again.

 

{ooo}

 

Tony wakes up to a major kink in his neck and the taste of a hangover gone stale on his tongue. He lies on the bed like a a stringless puppet, crusty-eyed and sweaty, desperatly trying to ignore the headache forming behind his eyeballs. At the edge of his memory, shouting and pain mix with green flames in the dark, and it’s all he can do to push them back in favor of Loki’s words.

 _Be rea_ _ _dy_ _ _for an escape tomorrow. You will know when the time comes._

 

Of course he had to be a fucking cryptic with that, too. What an asshole.

 

Tony still hopes, though. He thinks about the not-quite-dream all day long as he lies down, unable not to wish Loki said the truth. Unable not to feel like time has turned into especially thick syrup as he keeps his hands under the pillow, clutching Loki’s open knife just in case.

Somewhere around what’s probably the beginning of the afternoon, Clint comes back with more food. He doesn’t make a show of roughing Tony up this time, which is definitely progress, but he does mouth ‘be ready’ when he leaves the tray. If nothing else, it probably means Clint is on Tony's side.

In times like these, it’s a thought worth clinging to.

 

{ooo}

 

As far as Tony can tell, it’s about four when the guards start screaming. Muffled shouts and the slap of flesh on flesh fill the air for a hot second, and then there’s a pregnant silence and the hiss of Tony’s cell door sliding open. Tony, who at this point is little more than a random collection of ill-kept hair and bloodshot eyes in hospital pajamas, watches a skinny silhouette in red and blue spandex stride into the room with confident steps, pause into a full-bodied show of surprise, and exclaims:

 

“Dude, you look like crap!”

 

The boy sounds something like seventeen, maybe eighteen. Barely college age, at any rate. It doesn’t stop Tony from saying he’s been worse.

 

It’s both true and false. Afghanistan hurt more, physically speaking. He doesn’t remember feeling that empty while he was there, though, too busy trying to figure out how to get Yinsen and himself out to feel sorry about his life.

He wouldn’t go back there just to stop being depressed though, thank you very much.

 

“How did you know where to find me?” He asks, following the kid out into empty corridors with Loki’s swiss knife in hand, “Clint managed to get blueprints out?”

“Yeah, and then a little spider talked to me in a dream.”

 

A pause, and then:

 

“I mean, it was really more like the biggest tarantula the world has ever seen, but it’s not as funny an image.”

 

Tony’s too busy trying to walk in a straight line to care much, either way, but whatever rocks the kid’s world, really. How or why on Earth Anansi got involved, he has no idea. Same goes for Spiderman, actually, but neither of these questions feel pressing enough to distract him from the very real, very urgent need to get away from this place.

So he runs.

 

They reach a doorway that probably leads outside about fifteen minutes into Tony’s escape, four S.H.I.E.L.D agents standing in their way with old Nazi weapons at the ready, and Tony’s heart sinks.

No way he’ll get past them.

 

“Okay,” Spiderman says, twisting his head until the bones in his neck crack, “no offense but I think we’ll be better off if I handle that one on my own. You’re in no shape to fight, pop.”

 

Tony would quip back and say the kid is being a little generous about his suit-less abilities, but he doesn’t have the time. He’s barely started opening his mouth, and one guard is down already, dragged to the ground with a clever use of silky—and sticky—rope. Spiderman runs toward the next one, yells ‘crotch!’ and hit the man with exactly that part of his anatomy, catching one of the two women in the jaw with his foot as he twists the male guard around.

The second woman manages to get a grip on him and twist his arm behind his back, but before Tony gets to helping him, he’s jumped and twisted in such a way that he broke the woman’s nose with his knee and wriggled free of her headlock.

 

“Phew,” he says, voice rough from the chokehold, “thank heaven for super flexibility, right?”

 

Tony doesn’t have time to answer before someone grabs his arm and forces him to start running. He barely realizes it’s Clint in time to avoid punching at him—and then it stops to matter, because he’s finally outside.

He was never a very outdoorsy person before but Hell, he’s ready to get into full time camping right now, relishing the wind on his face more than he could have thought possible, so happy to be let out of that damned cave of a jail cell that he barely manages to hold himself upright.

 

“Stark!” Clint yells in his ear with the tone of someone who’s been trying to get his attention for a bit, “they’re trying to torture Banner into hulking, we gotta move out fast!”

“He’s not gonna do it!” Tony protests even as he picks up his pace to keep up with Clint, “Bruce—”

“I’m not wondering if he wants to hold it in,” Clint replies, guiding Tony away from where a gaggle of agents are fighting a man on a horse car, “I’m wondering if he’ll be able to! He’s never had to resist torture before, we don’t know how it’ll affect him!”

 

Tony, still half-drunk from sudden freedom, wishes he could protest. Bruce saved his life multiple times already—sometimes as Hulk, even!—but Clint as a point. This is brand new territory, and they’re probably better off getting to safety before they start pondering the nature of Bruce’s doppelganger and how it’s gonna react to pain.

Around them, the air screams with explosions and too many voices, multiple fights breaking on the ground and across the sky as Tony lets Clint and Spiderman drag him out into what may or may not be the desert of New Mexico. He thinks he makes out a voice that sounds like thunder in the chaos but, really, there’s no way to be entirely sure.

 

“We gotta come back for Bruce,” he manages between two steps, dodging Clint’s elbow when he shoots at an agent.

“We gotta get you to safety,” Clint says, eyes roaming the landscape around them for something, “if Banner’s smart he’ll let the other guy come out and get him out of Fury’s hands.”

“But he’s—”

“I don’t see our back up!” Spiderman yells, “Where’s she?”

“Hell if I know! You seen a cat recently?”

 

Tony stumbles on the uneven ground, legs of cotton and shot vision combining to mess up with his balance, but he’s still got enough brain to despair at Clint’s words. A cat? they’re hanging their survival on a damn cat? God, they’re so lost—he’s just gonna die here and get this kid who asked for nothing down with him and then—

 

“Oh fuck!”

 

Tony twists on himself to follow Clint’s line of sight, trusting the guy to take them through a manageable path...and immediately regrets his decision.

Behind them, mounted onto some kind of vaguely horse-like mechanical monstrosity, the scarred man who visited Tony is flinging people out of his way like they’re annoying flies and not full grown adults. He’s yelling something Tony doesn’t understand but, more importantly, he’s catching up to them. Fast.

 

“Damn it all!” Clint shouts, “Bastet! Where the fuck are you!”

 

There’s a flash of grayish-pink flesh by Tony’s feet, a shape running toward the artificial horse as the scarred man prepares to shoot, and then he’s flung to the ground under the weight of a hairless lion with a snarl of hatred that shakes the air around Tony.

 

“The portal’s behind the rock,” the lion—lioness, judging by the voice—yells over the scarred man’s struggling body, “go!”

 

Tony is scrambling to turn around before Spiderman even manages to grab him—there’s a sharp pain in his guts as he runs, the exhaustion finally settling in, but he doesn’t let it stop him and keep going, passing a giant boulder at breakneck speed.

 

He doesn’t notice the hole until he’s already falling.

 

{ooo}

 

“Finally,” a deep, cheerful voice exclaims when Tony climbs back to consciousness, “I was beginning to think you’d never wake up!”

 

Trying to ignore the voice, Tony keeps his eyes closed and tries to list his injuries—there should be some, considering the day he’s had...whenever he got knocked out.

He doesn’t find anything.

Nothing hurts.

There’s no fire in his veins, no throbbing in his head, no itching and pulling around the reactor, no dull ache where he thought he’d pulled a muscle running, nothing at all.

He’s not sure what it says about him that the absence of pain is what makes him open his eyes and panic.

 

“Alright, alright, try to calm down,” the voice says when Tony bolts upright, “it took a while to patch you up, and probably even longer to negotiate your return with Hades, let’s not go and ruin all that good work.”

 

Tony turns, and stares at the woman he finds there. She’s about as tall as Thor, though her shoulders and hips are slightly narrower. Long, bleached-blond hair tumbles into a thick braid over her right shoulder, and when she walks closer to examine Tony it’s easy to spot the freckles on her golden cheeks.

 

“What the hell?” Tony exclaims when she inspects his wrists and there’s no trace of scarring there, “Where the fuck am I?”

“The exact answer is a little complicated,” the woman says with an apologetic smile, “so for the sake of simplicity we’ll just say it’s my infirmary, for now.”

“Right. And how long have I been in ‘your infirmary’?” Tony asks with his heart in his throat.

“A little under three days. You were awake for some of it, actually, but you kept trying to tear your glowing gadget out and re-open your wrists, so I sedated you. You should be able to get out tomorrow, depending on your state of mind...in the meantime, you can visit Anansi in the next room but going further would be a bad idea.”

 

Tony blinks, and takes his first proper look around the room.

White stone walls, too smooth to be natural but not enough to be a modern building, curve in as if to cover whatever is inside them. Blue light, rippling over the room like it had to get through water, mixing with the light of several candles to paint the atmosphere a golden kind of turquoise. It’s unusual and somewhere halfway between magical and spooky, but it’s also oddly soothing. Secure, more than stifling. It’s a nice change of pace.

As for the furnitures, aside from the way they curve in to accommodate the walls, they look fairly infirmary-like. A spartan bedside table for each of the three narrow cots, a roll up tray with instruments waiting to be used, and a basket filled with whatever it is an infirmary needs to throw away. To the left, a closed door. To the right, a door left ajar, the low hum of conversation filtering through it—probably Anansi’s room, then. Tony should probably go and visit.

 

He doesn’t have it in him to do it, though.

 

He didn’t expect to wake up. didn’t even really want to, either. What does he have to come back to, these days? An empty house without Jarvis? A bunch of broken dreams? More problems than he can even begin to count? And that’s taking Loki out of the equation. Loki who, unless he’s even more of a jerk than he already showed, might come walking though that door at any moment. Wonderful.

Honestly, Tony wishes he could stop thinking about him. He’s going to have to, at some point, whether he likes it or not. Might even be a good idea to do so, in the long run. Right now though, nothing in his body hurts—not even the reactor—and his mind is just numb enough to keep him from a fall in complete despair.

It’s not ideal, but compared to the past few days it’s progress, and Tony is not going to ruin it with undue concern, thank you very much.

 

“Aren’t you going to ask me about Anansi’s health?”

 

It take tremendous effort to look at the woman again. Here eyes, almond shaped with a distinct fold at the corners, are so dark they’re almost black, but they’re warm too, and comforting. Well, there’s also a hint of reproach in there, but Tony doesn’t really have the energy to care about that.

 

“I assume he’ll be alright. He’s a God.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t try and be a proper friend to him. Or, you know, a polite person.”

 

Tony tries to snort, but it comes our more like a huff of breath. Either way, it’s not the answer the woman was angling fro, because she crosses her arms over her chest with a more obviously disapproving stare. She’s wearing an apron over a purple wool tunic, more prepared for viking ships than the imperial court of China, but what does Tony know about mythology, after all? Just ‘cause nobody talks about godly emigration doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

 

“Just because you’re out of it doesn’t mean you get to be an ass, Tony Stark.”

“And just ‘cause you know my name doesn’t mean you get to use it like you’re my mom,” Tony replies without much heat, “I don’t even know who you are.”

“Only because you didn’t ask.”

 

The woman’s voice deepens with every sentence, like her annoyance at Tony can be measured in how many octaves she can drop. She still reaches for a bowl and holds it out to Tony, with a firm ‘eat something’ when he takes it in hand.

It’s something like gruel, bland-looking on the whole, though when Tony tries it he finds nuts, honey and dried fruits as well. He doesn’t have the capacity to enjoy it in full, that’s true, but at least it tastes of something.

There are worse thing to unenthusiastically munch on.

 

“My name’s Sigyn, by the way.”

 

The name sounds vaguely familiar, but Tony doesn’t quite get why until Sigyn adds:

 

“You might know me as Loki’s wife.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and critiques make me want to keep writing! <3


	13. Envole moi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everybody owes Tony an explanation. No, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, updates are hopefully going to be quicker again soon, but I can't promise anything.
> 
> On another note, mcrdoctorwho wrote a [poem](http://archiveofourown.org/works/485654) relating to this story! [Uncontrollably excited Hiddles.gif]
> 
> Lastly, I'm in kind of a rush right now so yes, I noticed the formatting is weird, and I'll fix it tomorrow! Sorry about that, too >

So, honestly, Tony knows about irony. He’s kind of been on both ends of it too often to pretend otherwise. If he was asked to classify his experiences though, this one would definitely take the cake. Because the thought of Tony Stark, playboy extraordinaire, being heartbroken over an adulterer?

Yeah, the papers would laugh about it for decades.  
(He’s careful not to look too closely at his own choice of word on that one. Denial still feels preferable to the truth right now.)  
  
Seriously though, fuck Tony’s luck. He’s lying in a bed he doesn’t know, in a place that’s starting to feel like fucking Atlantis, and he’s talking to Loki’s wife . It’s all so perfectly fucked up it almost makes him forget about the surprisingly small of pain in his arms, his legs, his lungs. It’s like his body is being put back in working order and Tony can’t even bring himself to care… he’d say the universe is against him, but he’s pretty sure the universe doesn’t give a fuck about him.  
Sigyn, meanwhile, is examining his eyes, putting her ear to his chest in order to listen to his heart. She checks the rest of him then, and Tony realizes two things. First, he’s naked under the covers and second, the large burn across his hip is gone.  
He’d gotten it when he was ten and starting to build his own engines –and learning that some things shouldn’t be done without adult supervision at his age, not even when you’re a genius already. It’s the oldest scar he remembers getting, or at least the most meaningful one. It’s been here for so long, Tony completely forgot what it was to look down at himself and not see that brown like of skin, and its absence disturbs him.  
  
“Drink,” Sigyn says as she brings a glass to his lips. Tony obeys, and his mouth fills with the taste of apple juice, clear as water with the acidic tang of wild apples. “This will help your body heal… It will erase your scars, too.”  
  
Tony’s eyes fly to his wrists, where the scars left by the kitchen knife look several decades older than they’re supposed to… but on his left arm, the slices from Loki’s so-called present are still there, red and raw lines crisscrossing against the tan of his skin. He expects them to turn into those bumpy purple scars he gets sometimes, like veins swelling into a bruise under his skin.  
Sigyn must have caught his gaze, too, because she amends:  
  
“Most of your scars. Idunn’s apples can do a lot of things, but they cannot erase scars that were left by magic or birth.”  
“Birth?” Tony echoes, still numb from shock.  
“Yes,” Sigyn answers, “this means that you will retain your bellybutton.”  
  
To be perfectly honest, Tony doesn’t hear her. In fact, he’s not even listening at this point, because his scars are almost gone.  
He’s not quite sure how to feel about that.  
It’s not that he likes them – he hates that he got in a position to make them appear in the first place- but he doesn’t despise them either. It feels strange to realize it, but in the past three months he’s grown… accustomed to them. Kind of like the burn on his hips, they became a part of him, and although it’s not like he never paid attention to them anymore, he stopped shying away from them.  
I tried to die, he thinks.  
It’s only four words, but it’s still big. It’s big because, as much as Tony wishes he couldn’t feel a thing right now, he finds himself willing to live on. Which, let’s be honest, is a surprise, too. He doesn’t know why. Sure, he’s realized people cared more for him than he thought, and that helps. It’s hard to remember, but it helps. Somehow though, Tony feels like there’s more to his willingness to live than just a reaffirmation of something he should have known from the beginning.  
He thinks about what Sigyn said when he opened his eyes.  
  
“I was beginning to fear you would never wake up.”  
  
Except not. It’s not her who said that. The words are wrong in Tony’s memory. The voice is wrong. The tone is wrong. He can’t quite place it yet but knows, he feels like he should know who said that, and when, and where.  
But he can’t remember and he sighs as he lets Sigyn wipe the sweat from his face and upper body with a wet towel. It could be humiliating, but right now it takes his mind off memories he can’t quite grasp, and he asks:  
  
“How long have you been married?”  
“A while,” Sigyn says. “Although by your count, it would sound a lot longer.”  
  
Tony considers keeping his next question to himself, because Sigyn has apparently saved his life, and he doesn’t really want to be impolite… he needs to know though. So he says:  
  
“Why?”  
“Because I love him, and he loved me.” Sigyn looks at him as though she’s able to read his next question in his eyes – and for all Tony knows, she might be - and adds: “He still does, of course. But it’s more fond friendship and less passion. He would have divorced me by now if he could.”  
“Why—?”  
“Divorce doesn’t exist in Asgard,” Sigyn cuts, and her arms wrap around Tony’s shoulders to lift him in a sitting position. “Only death or repudiation can break a marriage, and neither of those are options, for obvious reasons. Raise your arms.”  
  
Tony does. He feels Sigyn slip a linen shirt over his head, and it’s plain and scratchy on his skin, not unlike the tongue of a cat. He doesn’t remember how repudiation works, never cared for its repercussions, so he doesn’t know why it’s not an option, but he doesn’t really want to ask. It’s ridiculous, really, but he kind of like Sigyn too much for that already.  
Which is ridiculous, too, because she’s Loki’s wife, but what do you want. Apparently, life decided Tony would be stuck with the clichéd, impossible-to-hate wife. Just his luck, really.  
  
He lets her set some cushions behind his back and rest him against them when she’s done. Then she leaves, saying she’s getting something for him to eat, and Tony nods, even though he doesn’t feel hungry.  
He feels like he needs to be alone for a little while.  
  
“I was beginning to fear you would never wake up.”  
  
The souvenir rushes back like a freight train.  
The smell of hospital, the sobs from across the corridors, and the high pitched voice of a blond haired woman in a skimpy outfit… and then the realization that this woman was someone else, someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. Someone who wasn’t supposed to care, but still did, to a certain extent.  
Someone who said he knew what Tony was going through.  
  
It dawns on Tony, then, that this is exactly why he doesn’t want to die this time around. Not because of Loki, or even Lorna. It’s not the knowledge that they exist that makes Tony want to struggle onwards, but the knowledge that someone got it.  
And ironically enough, it doesn’t even matter whether Lorna was real or not. She understood , and that’s all that counts. Because, Tony realizes, that’s not something you can fake. This kind of things, this kind of pain, it’s not something you can pretend to know when you don’t. You can try to imagine. You can try to extrapolate from past experiments, and you can even be convincing at it, you can come close to it, in fact.  
But there’s a look when you speak about it, a tilt of head, a sadness in your eyes that not even the best actors can fake. It’s like an invisible scar left by the unshakable conviction that the world would probably be better off without you. Lorna had that look, and whether she’s a part of Loki or a fake persona, the fact remains that Tony can’t bring himself to think she faked it. Not completely.  
And it’s this, the knowledge that someone knew what it felt like to feel like your skin is too large to fit, that makes Tony want to live.  
  
Because if others can deal with this and survive, maybe he can do it, too.

**{ooo}**

  
Sigyn comes back to the sight of Tony curled up on his bed and trying to hide his tears.  
He’s not sure what kind of tears they are – he kind of blames them on mental exhaustion and a mix of everything else. All he knows is that when Sigyn wraps her arms around him and holds him there, it’s the first time in his life he’s been hugged like a child.  
He’s not sure why it makes him cry harder.  


**{ooo}**

  
“You’re a good caretaker,” Tony finds himself saying after he’s finished the seafood and apple juice Sigyn brought him.  
“It is what I was made for. There is little wonder in accomplishing your purpose in life.”  
“Don’t speak like that,” Tony says, the words grating. “You’re not a machine.”  
“No,” Sigyn admits with a shrug, “I’m a minor figure in a pantheon created by men who thought women existed only to serve them.” She smiles, and it’s accepting, but not quite amused yet. “If you ever read the Edda, you will see that I do not appear much. My only role is to bear Loki’s children and care for him.”  
“But…” Tony starts, “you don’t have to.”  
“No,” Sigyn says, and her smile bears a bittersweet kind of amusement now, like it’s there to replace tears. “I do this because I want to. But I also know that I want to because it is how I was created.”  
“Wait,” Tony says, a headache forming between his temples, “wait, what about free will?”  
“We did not always have it,” Sigyn says patiently. “It has only been a few centuries since the vice of your belief loosened enough for us to actually change anything to our destinies. Before that, everything the old societies told in their legends could do nothing but come to pass.”  
“But that would be slavery!” Tony protests, shocked. “How could you live through that and not hate us?”  
“And what on earth makes you think we don’t?”  
  
The woman on threshold to the infirmary is short and dark skinned, her long hair falling on her shoulders like a mane. Her eyes are golden and cat-like, and she’s wearing one of those white dresses the Egyptians liked to paint in their hieroglyphs. Tony recognizes her at once, partially thanks to the bandages he can make out around her side.  
  
“Bastet.”  
“At present,” she answers. “And I repeat, what makes you think we don’t hate humans?”  
  
Well, talk about discoveries.  
Tony would be completely unable to say how his life became what it is right now. In fact, he’d be incapable to say what his life is right now. Sometimes it feels like he’s living in Call of Duty, others it’s more like one of those incredibly long artsy movies, with a lot of silent staring through windows.  
It’s not that Tony doesn’t understand them, it’s just that it takes him a while.  
  
“You envy us,” he says. “Sometimes it turns into hate. Sometimes it doesn’t.”  
“He truly is a smart fellow, isn’t he?” Sigyn asks, smiling at Bastet. “I understand why Loki would have picked you.”  
  
Before Tony has time to ask what Loki picked him for, he hears the rustle of foreign metal and heavy cape, and an infectious laughter he’s missed like crazy for nearly two weeks. He tries to sit as straight as he can, and restrains from adding width to his smile. He’s happy enough as it is for now. He doesn’t need more, and he’s ready to welcome his friend.  
Thor is blond and big and beautiful as he always is. Only now, Tony questions. He wonders what it is to be a God, with all the power that implies, and still be at the mercy of a bunch of people who barely even care about deities anymore. To know that you have one purpose in life, that you have use.  
Tony thought of himself as mostly useless for a long time, and he’s accustomed to it. Hates it, but still knows it. After all, it’s not like Howard or Maria ever made him feel like he was anything else, willingly or not.  
  
It’s the first time in his life he wonders what it feels like to know you’re useful and, maybe, wonder if you’re anything more.  
  
Thor walks up to the bed, where Tony is still naked under the covers, and sits next to him. A few months ago, Tony would have laughed at the idea of Thor taking his hand. Now he kind of hopes it’ll never stop… which he knows is sappy as hell, but hey. He’s just realized that he wants to live and that he’s—well. He’s allowed anyway.  
  
“Clint Barton told me what happened to the spirit of your house,” Thor sighs. “I am sorry for your loss, Tony.”  
  
Tony isn’t sure what tightens his throat.  
Maybe it’s the fact that Thor called him Tony when he used Barton’s full name. Maybe it’s the very egoistic but oh-so-reassuring feeling that he has precedence over someone in his friend’s heart. Or maybe it’s because he was just offered condolences for Jarvis, instead of a comment as to how it’s a computer, Tony, really!  
He never acknowledged before how much he needed Jarvis.  
Sure, the armbots were a severe blow, but Jarvis… Jarvis is special. Jarvis is, for all intent and purpose, Tony’s best friend. He’s the Alfred to his Bruce Wayne and honestly, Tony doesn’t care if he’s been reading too many comic books again, it’s just how things are.  
Maybe it’s ironic that Thor of all people is the one who acknowledges the role of an AI in Tony’s life, but it still feels good.  
  
“It’s—well. Thanks,” Tony says. “It’ll get better. I hope.”  
  
Thor nods, eyes fixed on Tony’s left arm, and they both keep silent long enough for Sigyn to usher Bastet out of the room. (“Really, you’d think they would get it done as soon as possible but n—” “Just walk, Bastet.”)  
In the end, it’s Tony who breaks the stillness by shaking his arm a little.  
  
“Hey,” he says without pausing to consider the irony of him comforting anyone, “It’s alright. I’m—well. I’m not fine but… I’ve been worse.” A pause, and Tony confesses: “I’ve been a lot worse, considering.”  
  
It’s not that he’s okay, or that he’s convinced things will get better. He knows himself, he’s probably always going to be waiting for shit to hit the fan. Only it’s like with the arc reactor. Before that, when doctors asked him to grade pain, he’s go straight for the high numbers, not because he wanted to lie, but because it felt really painful.  
Then he got stuck with his exclusive flashlight and a constant six on a one-to-ten scale, four when he doesn’t forget his medications.  
He could have just added the numbers after that, rank up in the elevens, twelve, worse.  
Instead, apparently, he’s made it his new zero.  
It’s sort of the same thing with his psyche. In the past months, he’s reached depth he never imagined could exist before. Sure, he’s always been depressive, but never to the point of actually doing anything about it… until that night. And like the Arc reactor, it could have been the start of an ever-fastening fall to hell.  
But like the arc reactor, it’s become his new zero.  
  
The position Tony is in right now? Before, he’d have called that a minus one on his scale of happiness. Maybe a zero.  
Right now, he’s willing to make it a One.  
The idea almost makes him smile.  
  
“You could be better,” Thor insists with his eyes still down, “If I had been there to defend you.”  
“I really don’t see what you could have done,” Tony says with something like regret.  
“I could have told them they were wrong,” Thor answers. “That Loki didn’t ensnare you – not the way they think he did.”  
  
The revelation that Thor knows what happened between Tony and Lorna – or Loki, or whatever they’re called when they merge - is a punch to the gut. It makes Tony’s stomach twist in fear, tense in a way that’s not unlike his attitude when facing Howard, decades ago. Before he can joke that he’s been even stupider than everybody thought, Thor starts talking in a rush:  
  
“I must confess something to you, Tony. I am sure you have not forgotten that I left our Tower days before Fury tried any kind of maneuver against you. I said that I needed to take care of some family matters, and I did not lie. I was with Loki.”  
“You… what?”  
  
Yes, Tony is aware that he’s really, really not in a place to judge and really, he’s not. He’s just really, really surprised. Thor doesn’t look up at his face, so it’s entirely possible that he misreads Tony’s comment as disapproval but, amazingly, he doesn’t seem to resent Tony for it.  
  
“I was with Loki,” Thor repeats. Then he sighs, long and tired, and says: “Perhaps it is best that I start from the beginning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments and critiques are welcome! [And Tumblr is a good place for them, too :)](http://fanfanwrites.tumblr.com/ask)


	14. C'est pas marqué dans les livres

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony discovers that some thing are not talked about in the myths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quoted lyrics translate as follow: _It's not written in books/ [but] the most important [thing] to live / is to live from day to day / time is love_

_C’est pas marqué dans les livres_  
 _Le plus important a vivre,_  
 _C’est de vivre au jour le jour_  
 _Le temps c’est de l’amour._  
- _Lucie_ by Pascal Obispo.  
  
Tony follows Thor’s gaze to the side of the room, and at first he mistakes what he sees for a window.  
Upon closer inspection though, the thing proves to be windowless and, more importantly, opening on water. How the monster-like fishes swarming into the light like moths around a lamp don’t fall on the ground, Tony doesn’t know, but he suspects it has to do with whatever technology or –gasp- spell is holding the water out.  
He doesn’t know how the knowledge that he’s probably extremely deep underwater doesn’t trigger his more-or-less latent claustrophobia but then again, the whole thing feels so surreal that he can’t blame his brain for not catching up just yet.  
  
“Tell me,” Thor starts – and lo and behold, he does have an indoor voice, after all. Tony has to admit, he doesn’t like it… he’d rather have the loud as fuck Thor back; but then this one is clearly channeling his inner Loki, if his body language is any indication, and Tony listens close as the God asks: “What do you know of Loki’s children?”  
  
Surprisingly little, actually.  
Tony knows that Loki’s first kid was conceived by not-quite-rape – which by the way, Loki may not feel violated by the idea but to Tony, it still counts. He knows Loki has more than one child, and he knows he never really got to raise any of them. He supposes more than he knows that he’s had a kid or two with Sigyn.  
Aside from that, it’s a huge fucking blur, and Tony doesn’t know if he’s supposed to feel as disappointed by the realization as he does.  
  
“I know the first one is a horse,” he says, refusing to look at Thor. “And that they were taken away.”  
  
He kind of expected Thor to deny the implied accusation against his dad – he hoped he would, at least, hoped it wouldn’t be as horrible as Lorna’s silences made it sound.  
Instead, Thor just looks very, very sad.  
  
“Sleipnir was made my father’s mount,” he explains with his eyes lowered on his hands, still wrapped around Tony’s wrists.  
  
Tony, who feels very grateful for the shirt Sigyn gave him all of a sudden. It’s one thing to have a doctor look at his scars, but showing them to the world is quite another, and knowing that Loki’s wife saw his arc reactor is terrifying enough as it is.  
(He tries not to think about Loki and his arc reactor to closely though. Every time he does lately, all he gets it the sharp sound of metal hitting glass and well, performance issues, it’s not uncommon you know, one out of five m — nope. Not a good train of thoughts.)  
  
“Loki spent the first few years of his son’s life by his side in the stables. No cajoling, no threat, no slur would make him leave, until he realized that his presence was causing more harm than good to his child. Sleipnir was too young to understand what a bastard or a half-man was, but Loki wasn’t, and although Sleipnir’s official position as a royal stallion did not allow for any true challenge to be issued, many an Aesir suffered Loki’s so-called pranks in revenge. I believe his mischievous streak really did take a turn for the worse in those times.”  
  
Thor is looking at Tony now, he can feel it, but he keeps his own gaze glued to the not-quite window, unable to look his friend in the eyes for now.  
  
“For a long time, Loki mourned his parenthood… he would have looked very young to you. One of your teenagers, I believe” –Tony’s grip tightens on his blanket - “for a long time, he refused to talk to anyone. I used to wait by his door as he sat, motionless and silent in the shade of his wardrobe. I would tell him stories of my days and recount my friends’ exploits, wishing it would help, wishing he would wake from his trance and be my brother again. I believed my father’s word and I truly did think Loki would come to realize we were all looking out for him, trying to act in his best interest. I was wrong. We all were.”  
  
Tony feels Thor’s fingers clench around him, pressing against his flesh in a grip that is only just shy of painful, and then they are off, as though Thor felt burned by the very contact of his skin. There is a wetness in his breath that Tony has never heard before, not even when they talked in front of the museum and the rain pouring from the sky felt like tears on his skin.  
  
“I have told you of Heimdall before. He is the guardian of our realm, and his sight is not impaired by night or distance… it is, however, mostly turned outward from Asgard. He had no cause to be watching us at the time, and he did not know that Loki had achieved the art of changing his appearance into that of another human-like creature. We used to wear our true forms then, and a black-haired woman bore no resemblance to my brother. Heimdall had no cause to pay special attention to her.  
“Nevertheless, he is the all-seeing guardian, and he did witness the journey of this woman through Svartalfheim. He saw her meet and be courted by Angrboda, a renegade giant banned from Jotunheim because of his appearance, much too close to his elvish parents for the tastes of his peers.  
“Angrboda courted and married Serrure, which was the name Loki had chosen for his new form. I learned later that he never let out anything of his past, erasing Asgard and his family altogether, as if nothing ever existed. Soon, Serrure grew great with child, but she was not at peace. She feared her husband’s reactions, should the child look like an Aesir.  
“She left her husband under the pretense of giving birth surrounded by nature, as is the custom of light elves. Jörmungandr was born a snake, of great size. According to my mother, Serrure never showed any sign of fear or disgust toward any of her children, and she brought this one to her husband, but the encounter did not go as planned. Angrboda refused to be a father to a serpent, and he convinced his wife to throw the child into the oceans of Midgard, where he resides to this day.”  
  
In his palms, Tony can feel the blunt shape of his nails digging bruises, pressing until the flesh gets numbs around there because this… he doesn’t know how to qualify it.  
He knows how to deal with absent father and torture and depression and suicide. Admittedly, it’s a pretty shitty way of dealing that involves a lot of alcohol and as little thinking as possible, and would have gotten him killed eventually but it’s still a go-to reaction.  
What do you say to the story of a husband convincing his wife to drop their kid for the so-called greater good?  
  
“I thought you guys knew what was supposed to happen to you,” he lets out at last, a challenge to Thor’s story, to his words about his feelings.  
  
God, he’s starting to think like Loki.  
  
“What do you mean?” Thor asks, their eyes not-quite meeting.  
“Lorna told me she knew she was destined to have her kids and all that. How come you didn’t make the connection?”  
“Do you truly think Serrure was the only woman to bear children?” Thor asks, and his face looks disturbingly like that time when Tony and Bruce tried to teach him the rules of American football.  
  
(Thor ended up dubbing the sport ‘a lot of cowards masquerading as warriors’ and then went on to ramble about rugby, which he’d discovered with Clint. No amount of statistics concerning the number and seriousness of the injuries in American football vs. Rugby made him change his mind, which Steve thought was a shame, even if he tends to like baseball a lot better.)  
  
“We did know that Loki was destined to be a parent to more than one child, for he told us that much, but whether or not he knew of the exceptional shapes his offspring would take, he never told us about it. Such things are not easily shared, Tony,” Thor finishes, his voice clearly irritated. He seems to deflate then, and adds in a more subdued tone: “There is a daughter, in my future. I can feel her next to me at times, waiting for the time when she will be conceived. I know of her name, too, although that is because I gave the matter some thought more than the work of human minds –or so I like to pretend. I also know that Thrùd will not be Jane’s child.”  
“Do you know who…” Tony’s voice trails off when he realizes how intrusive his question really is –discretion is something he’s learned about in the past few months, amazingly enough. Thor, however, doesn’t seem to mind.  
“I do,” he says. “And so does she. But we have no idea what our daughter will be like, nor when or how she will be conceived… and to be honest, I do not wish to know. It was the same for Loki’s children, I hope. But if he did know what they would be like, who can blame him for not sharing that information with us? In his place, I do not think I would have done it either.”  
  
He sighs again, defeated and old like the ruins of those haunted castles Tony usually sees in documentaries about Scotland.  
  
“You have to understand, Tony, that in order to know why we acted the way we did, you must renounce to your ideas about free will, for we did not possess it at the time. Not where it counted. Some things in our lives could not –cannot be avoided. We all tried our best to live lives that were ours despite that fact, but such things aren’t easily done when you will and nature are tied to the belief of so many different people. We all made mistakes. Loki, my father, myself… none of us are free of guilt.  
“All those things, those stories about Loki’s children and our adventures, those quests we went on, they may have been written for us, imposed to us, but our actions did pave the way for them and thus, we cannot be freed of all blame. Not by ourselves, at least, and I—I only ever did what I thought was best. I will not deny that I was wrong in a lot of instances, and I certainly caused a lot of harm without meaning to. But I need you to understand that I am not the only one whose mistakes caused others to suffer. This is no different from what could have happened in a mortal family.”  
  
Tony looks at Thor’s face for the first time since they started talking, and the sight of tears on his cheeks makes him reel. It’s not like seeing a human man cry. Humans usually tend to avoid crying in public, especially guys, mostly because they get a lot of shit in the face when they don’t. Thor doesn’t do that. He just cries, the tears rolling down his face without any move being made to wipe them off. Thor’s hands are facing upward like a plea for a forgiveness Tony isn’t sure he’s allowed to give. For something assuring him that things will be okay again.  
  
Tony is struck with the idea of a prayer, and he can’t help but wonder: what is it that a God believes in? Are there things they consider above them? Are there place they visit in times of great needs, rites they must observe to please some form of invisible but more powerful beings?  
Does a God pray and, if yes, who does he pray to?  
  
The answer Tony comes up with sounds so weird, he doesn’t quite dare allowing himself to even think it.  
  
“What…” It takes him a second try to get the sentence out: “What happened next?”  
“Serrure confessed her ability to turn into a man when it pleased her. I did not know of her or Angrboda at that time, but I learned later that, at first, he assured her it mattered little to him. That he loved her, still. He did, however, reveal a tendency to grow uncomfortable whenever that particular talent was mentioned. Serrure learned not to talk about it too often.  
“Soon, she grew great with child again. When the child was born, half of her body appeared as ordinary as that of any newborn elf. The other one, however, was cast in shadows and, for that, her father named her Hela.”  
“Wait, you mean she’s been named after Hell?” Tony frowns because this is a new level of twisted, really, but Thor shakes his head.  
“No. Hel, in our tongue, designates the hidden place under the earth where the dead are assembled. There was no notion of evilness attached to it when my niece was born. The more sinister meaning of the world came from Christian missionaries and their wish to convert as many people as possible. They influence caused great harm to Loki’s daughter in later centuries, but now is not the time to recount this story. Suffices to say that Angrboda saw the shadows following her as a sign that she was made to rule where no light passes.  
“He took the child into Hel and placed her in the care of the spirits present there. The dead were so amazed to find a child who would grow in their midst and would not weep at their sight that they made her their queen on the hour, and they built an entire city for her. It was made out of every architecture and technology known in the nine realms, for the dead care little about their origins, and an economy soon developed, a hierarchy, a system of entertainment. From this time on, Hel was known as Helheim, the realm of the dead.”  
“This one actually doesn’t sound so bad,” Tony says, hoping he’s right, and he feels relieved when Thor’s lips curve upward.  
“It doesn’t indeed. Loki-as-Serrure was allowed to visit the queen of Helheim as often as it pleased him, and Hela became the most beloved ruler of all the realms – she still is today. But Angrboda did not look on this new situation too well. Whether he resented Serrure’s new found power or the very nature of the child she had brought him, I do not know. However, I was told that he started blaming his wife for the un-ordinary shapes of their offspring. From what I have learned afterwards, he used to say that none of this would have happened if Serrure had been a true woman.”  
  
Tony realizes he’s been worrying the inside of his lips when the taste of blood invades his tongue at Thor’s words. Because, see, he hasn’t forgotten what the god said earlier, about what people said of Loki’s masculinity. What if Loki left because of that? What did it feel like for him to leave a place where he was not enough of a man, only to end up somewhere he was not enough of a woman? It must have sucked.  
And to be completely honest with himself –which he usually tries to be- Tony has to admit, the past few months must have stirred a few unpleasant memory in Loki’s mind.  
  
“I wish I could just stop caring,” he mutters, and Thor’s eyes snap to his face:  
“What did you say?”  
“Nothing,” Tony answers a bit too quickly.  
  
He gets the feeling Thor heard exactly what he said, but the blond drops it, and Tony feels grateful for it. He’s not sure he’s ready to discuss his feelings regarding Loki with Thor yet. Or ever, for that matter.  
  
“There was a long period of calm after that,” Thor says slowly, as though trying to give Tony time to speak if he wants to. “But eventually, Serrure found herself with child for the third time. This pregnancy was harder than the previous three. I have heard very little about it, but none of what I learned was pleasant. Whether Fenrir was shaped by his parents feelings, nobody knows, although I suspect Loki could answer that question if he set his mind to it.  
“Regardless, my third nephew was born a fearsome creature, a wolf all grown, black as night with eyes red as blood, and fangs such as you have never seen. Unsurprisingly, Angrobda was even angrier at this child than he had been at the two others, and as Serrure lay dying in a pool of her own blood, he tried to strike her.  
“I did not witness the fight myself, but I do know that Fenrir ran to his mother’s defense and tore Angrboda apart. Meanwhile, Serrure was trying to heal herself, to no avail, for my brother was never as gifted in the arts of healing as he is in the rest of magic. There are ways, however, to recognize one’s seidr, and Heimdall immediately identified my brother.  
“I can still hear the sound of soldiers and healers rushing to the Bifrost, my father ahead of them, as they ran to Loki’s help. A hundred of them left, but only a mere handful returned with Fenrir in chains between them. The others, I learned, were slain in their efforts to reach Loki… for all his teeth, my nephew was but a pup yet, a newborn child who did not yet know that swords and daggers could be used to protect.  
“I did not fight when my father had him imprisoned, for I was told Fenrir was responsible for Loki’s state. It is not altogether untrue, although my views on the situation would have been very different, had I been aware of the full story. Meanwhile, Loki had been thrown on Sleipnir’s back and brought to the infirmary where—”  
“Wait!” Tony stops him. “Wait, how old were they then? In human terms, what was their age?”  
  
It’s not that Tony really wants to know, because he’s starting to suspect he’s going to loathe the answer, whether he’s still mad at Loki or not, but he needs to know, if only so he doesn’t make the same mistakes Thor did back then.  
He still resents Loki. Leaving him alone in Fury’s prison was unfair and unnecessary, and he doesn’t intend to let the topic drop anytime soon, but even Tony’s heart isn’t that dry that he can’t empathize with Loki’s pain yet.  
  
“Loki would have been twenty two,” Thor says, and Tony feels his jaw fall open of its own accord. “Sleipnir seven. I,” he adds before Tony can prompt him, “Would have been twenty six.”  
  
Kids. They were just kids when all that happened, and not just Loki, Thor, too.  
They were both –all- too young to be dealing with that kind of shit and yet they had and god but that explains so much. Because honestly, how can you expect someone to go through that and not go insane at some point?  
Tony always knew Loki had a shit ton of issues, that much was clear from the beginning. At first, he thought Loki was just randomly psychopathic, and he was fine with that – he doesn’t need to know a dude’s medical record to kick him in the ass. Then he got to know him and thought that okay, maybe Loki wasn’t crazy after all, just extremely depressed.  
But now, after what he’s heard, he can’t help but wonder: what if Loki is crazy because he couldn’t cope with such a level of depression? What if there is a limit to what a God can endure and Loki has reached it?  
  
What if he ends up in the same place?  
It’s not like his track record is going to reassure him on that one, after all. With all that’s happened to him in the past few years, between being attacked by Russian terrorists and an army of gremlin-sprouting Galactic Worms lead by the Glow Stick of Destiny, he can probably count himself lucky it took so much time for him to do something as stupid as cutting his veins open.  
  
But then, what if he’d gone about it another way? What if, instead of punishing himself for the pain he felt, he’d decided to punish the world instead? With his brain and money, he could probably have done as much damage as Loki did – maybe even more than that because he is earth-savvy where Loki isn’t.  
The new data makes everything that happened sound different, and Tony isn’t certain he knows what to think about that yet.  
  
“Loki stayed in the infirmary for a long time,” Thor says in an almost whisper. “My father was so worried that he even allowed Sleipnir to stay by his mother’s side, hoping that it would prompt Loki to fight for his own survival. Sigyn was an admirable caretaker, and she played a great part in Loki’s healing. He grew stronger, and they grew closer, and after a while, Loki asked my father for the permission to marry her.  
“Now, Sigyn is an orphaned woman from a lower family, and Father was reluctant at first, but Mother insisted, and they were married within the year. Loki did not tell me of the children that preceded Fenrir, nor did my parents, and for a long time I believed to be an uncle of four only.”  
“Two,” Tony corrects automatically, but he’s not surprised to see Thor shake his head.  
“Sigyn eventually gave birth to two boys,” he says. “Vari and Nari. They are quite young still, although they have seen more years than even the Captain of America did.”  
“That’s why they can’t divorce,” Tony says, remembering something Sigyn told him earlier. “Or is the proper term ‘repudiate each other’?”  
  
The words, to be frank, sting.  
Tony has never been a big believer in maintaining a marriage that doesn’t work anymore ‘for children’s sake’. Parents, in his opinion, should be able to make a difference between their love story and their kids’ well being, but then he’s probably not in a place to judge.  
  
“I fear that it does not work this way, Tony,” Thor sighs, closer to his normal volume. “Consensual divorce does not exist in our laws – I only learned of the notion after coming to midgard. There are only two ways to break a marriage—”  
“Death or repudiation,” Tony says.  
“Yes. A woman cannot repudiate her husband, only the reverse is true… but for a man to repudiate his wife, he needs a reason. Usually, the absence of children is considered to be a good enough reason, or a woman’s adultery… only, if Loki tried to end his marriage using this argument, it would mean denying his bond to Vari and Nari. Even if he were able to severe their bond in such a drastic manner, it would also mean that the twins would be considered bastards. He has seen what the status did to Sleipnir already. My brother is many thing, some of them very much unflattering, but he is not an indifferent father – or mother. He would never do that to them, and that is the only reason he has not ended his marriage to Sigyn yet.”  
“Yeah,” Tony nods. And then, because apparently he’s a masochist like that: “Plus, I really don’t see why he’d want to leave her.”  
“Because,” Thor says, unaware – or ignoring - of the rhetorical nature of Tony’s sentence: “Sometimes the way we love people changes.”  
  
It does indeed.  
You can go from friendship to love and back to something in between the two. And you can go from desperate need to a more balanced relationship, or vice versa, and there are so many ways to care or not about other people that Tony sometimes feels like his head is going to explode if he thinks about it too much.  
He wonders if he’s the only one who hasn’t found any better way to protect himself than decide not to think about it at all so long as he could avoid it.  
  
“What happened then?” He asks. “You said you were with Loki when Fury put me in the cell, why? What were you doing?”  
“Loki had gathered some friends of his to try and free Fenrir and Sleipnir from Asgard,” Thor explains. “Sleipnir was the easy part, despite the guards, and Coyote and Anansi managed quite well on their own. Their presence, however, was required for Fenrir’s escape, alongside with Loki’s and that of another of their friends… but he never came.”  
“Exactly,” Anansi says from the door.  
  
Tony takes in the scars on his torso, the massai-like fabric he’s wrapped in and, most importantly, the way his left arm was cut from the shoulder.  
  
“Don’t worry,” the god says when he notices Tony’s look, “It’s going to grow back –it’s not even bleeding anymore- but the pain is a bitch… I’m going to take great pleasure in repaying the one I owe that little gift to.”  
“And who is that,” Tony asks, because honestly, if someone out there abandoned a kid to a life in prison and got Anansi to lose an arm, he’d like to know who it is so he can at least avoid them.  
“I’m not sure you’d know his name,” Anansi says, “But he’s the one you should thank for your little stay in S.H.I.E.L.D’s facilities.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [As always, comments and critiques are much appreciated :)](http://fanfanwrites.tumblr.com/ask)
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> And if you want to listen to the songs that inspired the chapters titles and/or want to know more about this fic, you can go [there](http://fanfanwrites.tumblr.com/tagged/Fic%3A-SOS-Ecrits-Avec-De-L%27Air)


	15. (Dis le) Plus Fort.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which more questions are posed but Tony is, _finally_ starting to get some answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song that inspired the title is _Plus fort_ by Jean Jacques Goldman. The parenthesis is an addition I made, and this chapter's title translates as _(Say it) Louder_.

You could think Anansi would stay to reap the effects of his bombshell and, perhaps, tell Tony more about the guy who is behind their current problems. You could, but you would be wrong. Which, really, doesn't sit well with Tony because hey, he's only been tortured for a week here, no big deal.  
Sorry for making it personal.  
  
"You'd think I have a right to know that guy's name," Tony mutters once the spider, fully examined, is released from Sigyn's care.  
"You will," she says as she starts cleaning her instruments, "only later. He likes to have an audience."  
"And I like it too but you don't always get what you want."  
"It's a trickster thing," Sigyn says with exasperated fondness, "don't try to beat them to their own game, you don't play in the same field."  
  
Tony nods, but can't help mutter that showing off is supposed to be his job.  
  
"I know," Sigyn sighs, her lips smiling."It is no wonder they all like you."  
  
Tony sort of suspected as much, what with the whole seeing them again after he admitted to be an atheist, but having it confirmed still makes something happy flutter in his chest.  
  
"You should go for a walk," Sigyn advises after a while. "The meeting isn't starting for a while yet, and your body is as healed as can be. Sitting on that bed isn't going to do you any good now."  
  
Tony nods. He doesn't like sitting still for too long anyway. He's done a lot of that these past four months and it did nothing to alleviate the disgust he feels for inactivity. Inactivity is when you start thinking too much.  
So Tony takes the pants Sigyn is offering him and puts them on, wishing he didn't have to go commando because that fabric itches like crazy. Ah, but at least his chip is in the pocket and he feels a wave of relief wash over him once a quick check reveals that it didn't suffer any physical damage. Part of him wants to check the data, but -and that's a surprise, too- a bigger part just trusts Sigyn to have made sure nobody other than him touched his possession.  
  
For a complex that sits whoever knows how many leagues under the sea, this one looks pretty bare in terms of technology... given the inmates, Tony should probably not feel as surprised as he does but still. The walls are smooth-ish, looking like erosion simply made them that way, or scales rubbed on the stone for so long they shaped it. On the ground and ceiling, Tony can see lines that remind him of stretch marks, as if the tunnels grew, and it feels weird, but not weirder than having to step over a hole in the ground or two -those look a lot more natural, with stony protuberances inside them. They were probably here before the tunnels were, because they tend to match, and the thought helps Tony keep his worry at bay. If there are other tunnels, there are exits, and he's not stuck here.  
They create a lot of echo too, or so it seems, because Tony catches himself listening for the sound of footsteps behind him -except there is no one else with him so obviously, it can only be echo.  
  
Tony doesn’t have any direction in mind as he walks. All he knows is that the 'council room' where they're supposed to meet in order to finally learn what the fuck is going on, is somewhere ahead of him -he supposes if he can find it, he might as well sit down there to wait. Hopefully they'll have books or something.  
Tony is in the process of stepping around another hole in the ground when he catches two things. First, the echo of his footsteps, which is still behaving in a weird way... and second, Loki's voice. The god's head is visible through the opening in the ceiling as it takes a sinister expression in the green light from whatever spell he is using.  
Tony is debating whether to attract his attention when Loki speaks:  
  
"For the last time Itkomi, I know what I am doing. Trust me, he doesn't know. Everything is going to work as plan—"  
  
In the room above, Tony hears the sound of someone knocking on wood, and Loki's head turns, before the green light disappears entirely.  
  
"Unless you have come to apologize, I don't believe we have much to tell each other, Thor," he says.  
  
That, Tony knows, should probably be his cue to go away because if this isn't the premise for a private conversation, then he doesn't know what it is... but then again, when has Tony Stark been able to resist his curiosity? Being discreet is all good, but nothing makes him curious like Loki does... and besides, with what he went through because of the man, Tony thinks he's entitled to a little bit of eavesdropping, for revenge's sake.  
  
"I will not apologize for speaking the truth," Thor says, firm but not angry. "Father has faults, yes, and perhaps they are as numerous as you say, but you have made mistakes as well. I love you, Loki, but I will not indulge your fantasy of being only a victim in this situation."  
"Oh," Loki says, and Tony sees his neck stiffen, "Do you think Odin was right to keep my children prisoners then?"  
"Hel and Jörmungandr were no prisoner of Asgard's! She is a queen, and he is too big for our palace! There was no way to welcome them with us, you know that."  
"What about Sleipnir then?” Loki counters, “I know as well as anyone what his fate was, but I will not believe that the all-father had no mean to make his life easier!"  
"That I will admit was ill-thought but—"  
"What about Fenrir?" Loki presses, his head disappearing beyond the edge of Tony’s improvised window, "What about him? Are you going to tell me there were good reasons for his captivity, even after we were freed?"  
"And where would he have gone?" Tony hears Thor retort, growing more irritated, "Sigyn is afraid of him, as is the rest of Asgard! Even Father fears him, and you know he has good reasons for that!"  
"Ragnarok is not going to happen!" Loki protests, "You know it as well as I!"  
  
Tony knows he should go.  
He can tell things are going to get ugly soon, and he knows hearing two of the people who count most in his life fight will be hard on him, especially if kids are involved. And yet he can't move. Blame it on morbid curiosity, on a complete lack of self-preservation, blame it on whatever you want. Tony feels like he needs to hear this. He needs to know where this conversation is going, he needs to know what Loki will do and say.  
He needs to know if the gentle, loving person he saw in Lorna can exist in Loki, too, or if it was really just an act.  
  
"It still might, Loki!" Thor shouts, and the strength of it makes Tony's chest vibrate like thunder. "The chances may be minimal, but they exist!"  
"He is a child!" Loki says, and Tony knows what Thor will say before his voice rises again:  
"A child who massacred near a hundred of our soldiers not an hour after his birth!"  
"He was terrified!" Loki says, the volume of his voice matching Thor's with ease, "He needed protection! He needed someone who would teach him not to be afraid!"  
"You were that person," Thor tells his brother, and Tony feels almost as shocked as Loki must be. "You were the one teaching him but then you left and he had no one else who could come see him without making him panic!"  
"I fell!" Loki points out, "Through the abyss and darkness, you know what happened there! You saw the marks it left on me!"  
"You fell because you let go, Loki! I hate that you had to suffer so much, but you decided to let go of the spear! And even should I have pushed you, none of this would have happened had you not sought to destroy Jotunheim! Or will you claim that Father made you do this, too?"

"They were Frost Giants!" Loki shouts, "It doesn't count!"  
  
This is definitely the sickest thing Tony has ever heard Loki say, worse than his freedom via enslaving spiel, and that one was pretty nuts if you ask him. It’s the worst because it’s not just saying Loki doesn’t care about Frost Giants, whatever they are, it’s also implying that Thor should not care about them either, and Thor doesn’t sound all that eager to contest that point.  
(There is also that part where Tony remembers Thor thought Loki was dead when he cames to earth, and what if Loki expected to die as well?)  
  
"Oh, Loki," Thor sighs, and there is so much sadness in his voice that Tony feels his throat clench, "of course they were Frost Giants, but so are you, and so are your k—"  
"MY CHILDREN ARE _NOT_ MONSTERS!"  
  
It feels to Tony like something breaks in Loki's voice, and Tony remembers his expression on the Germany videos, the crazed smile he wore while promising slavery to the whole of humanity. Loki’s voice now sounds just as crazy, just as pressing, but in a far less happy way, and Tony feels his heart clench.  
This would all be so much easier if he could just decide to stop caring, damnit. At least this way he wouldn’t have to worry about the state of Loki’s psyche, and that would mean a lot less stress, he’s sure.  
  
“Loki,” Thor says, and Tony puts a hand over his mouth, trying not to hear how obviously freaked out Thor sounds, “Loki listen to me—”  
“Don’t you _dare_ imply they are!” Loki insists, "don’t _you_ dare say—don’t!”  
“I just want to—”  
“Don’t touch me! Don’t do that—don’t!”  
  
It’s not even the words that get to Tony. It’s not the sound of someone struggling or Thor’s voice trying to get Loki to calm down. No, it’s the way Loki says it. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying Thor disgusts him, rather like he’s trying to somehow protect Thor.  
And well, Tony thought Loki had it bad before but now, if this is all sincere….  
  
But that’s the big question, isn’t it? Is this sincere? Is Loki ever sincere, and how to be sure about it?  
Tony sometimes feels afraid there is no answer to those questions, because he doesn’t know what that means for his future life at all.  
  
Above him, it sounds like the two Gods have stopped struggling, and Tony can’t hear anything more than muffled sob –although whether it’s Loki or Thor’s voice, he can’t quite tell. Maybe both of them are crying, which would make sense. His cheeks are wet, after all, and he’s not even directly concerned by the conversation.  
  
Tony walks off, away from things he’s not supposed to have heard, and goes to find the council room.  
It’s pretty plain, empty save for a round table and about twenty chairs of various origins. There are two throne-like armchairs with celtic knots engraved into it, another one with greek symbols and small suns, another covered in wheels. One of them looks like those seats people keep at the back of their yachts for fishing, complete with a spot for the fishing pole. There are other chairs, of course –one with skulls all over it and the another one painted with blue hourglasses, and then other designs still.  
Tony goes to the utmost right office chair –one out of three- because it’s the one that is closest to the one shaped like a native-American drum, and sits down, resting his forehead against the mahogany.  
  
“Rough day?” a muffled voice asks.  
  
Tony isn’t surprised to see Clint and Spiderman coming up to him, side by side. Clint’s face is shut off, and Tony wonders if he really looks angry or if it’s just him projecting his fears on the blankness of his features.  
  
“I feel awesome,” Tony grumbles as they sit in the two remaining office chairs, Spiderman at his left, and Clint in the last chair, “Can’t you tell?”  
“I don’t know man,” Spiderman answers, “My mask has built-in shades, it’s cool for anonymity but not always the best for vision.”  
  
Tony snorts, because really, what else can he do? He could let himself spiral down. He could just sit there and do nothing and, frankly, it’s hard to do anything else but damnit he can’t. Stuff is happening. For some reason, there is a God out there who targeted him specifically, who decided to make his life Hell for the past two weeks and seriously, _what the hell_?  
  
Tony may be a pro at destroying his own life but he’ll be damned if he lets anyone else do it for him.  
  
“Honestly the only face I want to see right now is whoever is responsible for putting me in that fucking cell,” Tony mutters against the wood. “And then just long enough to aim a bullet at it.”  
“Not sure bullets would work against this guy,” Clint comments –when Tony takes a sneak peek, the archer is looking straight ahead of him with blank features. “You’ve seen what he did on that roof, that means he’s one of them.”  
“You’re not very fond of those Gods, are you?” Spiderman asks, and Tony turns his head to rest on the table sideways as he watches Clint answer:  
“One of them made me his freaking puppet in order to take over the planet,” he says, eyebrows lowering, “and the other one managed to put me in a position where forcing a recovering alcoholic mate to drink alcohol was my only possible option. Those guys are assholes.”  
“Not all of them,” Tony says, thinking back of Sigyn. “But if you want to punch that bastard with the caducei, make sure to hold him until I can join in. I’m pretty sure he’s the God Anansi was talking about earlier.”  
“Who’s Anansi?” Clint asks, and Spiderman says:  
“The giant spider that got me in on that mess. Pretty sure you haven’t met him because you’d have recognized a tarantula the size of a pony.”  
“He doesn’t always look like that,” Tony says as he straightens up in his chair, and Spiderman spins his chair to face him:  
“Wait, how do you know what he looks like?”  
“Stark,” Clint growls, “did you seriously go and befriend them—holy fuck, Stark, were you really  _dating_ Loki? Have you lost your shit?”  
  
Clint is standing now, his body a long line of rigid muscles as he looks down at Tony, who forces himself to stay still out of sheer provocation. Because he talks himself down easily enough, he doesn’t need Clint to do it for him, thank you very much.  
  
“That is really not the point,” he says. “You were telling us about the caducei guy.”  
“No but seriously, Stark—”  
“Drop it, Hawkeye. I’m not here to have you judge what I do in my free time, okay? Being with Lorna made me feel better, and maybe it was a mistake, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we’ll never know. All I know is I’m a fucking adult and I don’t care if you think I don’t act like it, you’re not my dad. Now tell me everything you know on the dude who caused you to basically torture me.”  
  
Clint’s tell is so small, Tony almost misses it, but the twitch in his cheek, minute as it is, can’t be mistaken for anything else than guilt, and Clint’s eyes drift to the door for the shortest of moments before he sighs, sits back and starts talking.  
  
“I knew there was something weird from the moment I saw the other guys with Hydra’s weapons,” he explains, arms crossed on his chest. “Like I said, he had to know using them in front of Rogers was a bad move. And then I realized something about the blood samples.”  
“Which is?”  
“There were thirty six vials in the box right? Six vials for each of us.”  
“Yeah, so?”  
“So Banner _destroyed_  his samples. He took them to avoid problems but by the time Fury came to arrest you, they’d been flushed down the toilet and replaced with red ink… Pretty easy since he was the only one working on them. Fury should have mentioned that to throw you off your game. There was literally no reason for him not to use the information, so that means he didn’t know about the destroyed samples.”  
“Which means he didn’t have them tested,” Spiderman says. “But that’s kind of stupid right? I mean, someone steals blood sample from my personal GMO mercenaries, I’m going to check the rest is good just in case.”  
“Exactly,” Clint approves. “That’s how I knew something was wrong, and so did Banner. We managed to talk later on, and agreed to stay put and wait for intel, which is when we realized whatever was happening was focused on you, and only on you. And I think I’ve seen the guy who’s –fuck, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think Fury’s being manipulated.”  
“That would explain why he thinks I’m not in my right mind,” Tony says, “But not the stupid outs he’s been giving me. I mean seriously, I get the vodka bit –screwing with your brain was how Natasha got you back last time, right? There’s few things that could screw with mine as much as alcohol does so he could have explained it away as putting all chances on your side or something, but why on earth were you even able to slip the knife past his notice?”  
“The knife?” Clint asks, surprised. “You mean the Swiss knife? I have no idea how that one stayed with you man,” Clint says.  
“My brother made sure it did,” Thor says from the door. “He needed it to be able to contact you.”  
  
Tony wants to question Thor’s affirmation. He wants to ask where Loki was then, if he was really so concerned about his health, what the fuck he was doing to bust Tony out because from where he stands, it all sounds like an awful lot of bullshit, and he thinks he’s had enough of that for a dozen lifetimes already.  
But behind Thor other people are coming in. Loki is there, of course, followed by a wolf the size of a cow and three kids with the same hair and eyes as he does. There’s a woman with ink-black skin and a heavy necklace of human skulls. She’s in deep conversation with a Mediterranean man whose body is covered in scars –at least what his Kevlar vest and camo pants don’t hide.  
Tony watches as about twenty people pour into the room and sit into their favored chairs –Coyote is sitting on his drum-like thing on Tony’s right, thus separating him from Loki –which is probably a good thing. After that come the three kids, Sigyn, a woman and three dude that Tony recognizes from Thor’s file, and Thor himself. They all took the seats with Celtic knots in it so that the next guy –who has light brown hair braided to frame his face and match his beard- gets the wheel patterned chair.  
Bastet, in a white linen dress, is placed next to him, followed by Anansi in his usual red suit. Beside him is the skull-necklace woman and her companion, who is now talking to the man dressed like a fisherman sitting in the fishing chair. Next to him, a younger man –he looks around twenty, maybe?- is readjusting his golden headband and his golden suit shines at his every move. Tony absently notes that Clint’s expression at his left hand neighbor is priceless, but refocuses his attention on Loki almost right away.  
  
His costume is spotless, his hair as controlled as ever, his face neutral in that ‘resting face’ way, rather than the ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ blank face, and Tony is impressed. He’s impressed because no matter how many examples of Loki’s skill at acting he gets, no matter how much he doubts, Tony will never be able to fully believe the God would fake a scene like Tony witnessed this morning.  
Loki, after all, is all about proving he’s ‘not weak’, why would he make such a mess of himself in front of the very person he wants to impress? Tony figures, even the god of Lies has to tell the truth from time to time, or he’d be a very poor liar.  
  
“Why the hell does it feel like we’re sitting at a war council?” Clint mutters from Spiderman’s left, and it’s Coyote who answers:  
“Because it is one.”  
“What? But she’s like ten or something!” Spiderman protests, pointing to one of the kids who look like Loki.  
  
  
The girl does look to be around ten, but her face is solemn and she’s dressed like a queen, all in blues and black with golden ornaments. She’s the one sitting on the throne made of human skulls, and it’s kind of disturbing to see her so at ease in it.  
  
“I have been a queen for longer than you and your mortal friends have lived,” She says –and okay, there’s no denying the fact that she has to be Loki’s daughter anymore, not with that tone. “It is my right, as a ruler of the dead, to sit at this table. What allows _you_  to be here?”  
  
Some members of the assembly nod, and Tony guesses those who do probably don’t like mortals all that much. It probably shouldn’t surprise him as much as it does.  
  
“Well I got him out of his cell,” Spiderman says, jerking a thumb toward Tony. “You know, doing Loki’s dirty job while he was chilling out who knows where.”  
“My father—” Hel starts, but Loki raises a hand and she stops talking.  
  
Her eyes, however, are fierce enough to make even Clint shift in his seat, and the left side of her body looks darker, more shadowed. Right, Tony thinks, Goddess. Even a miniature one could potentially do a lot of harm to them.  
  
“Contrary to your belief, there were reasons to my absence, which I will make sure to explain soon. In the meantime however, I believe Mr. Stark has a question to ask?”  
“Mr. Stark?” Clint points out, sounding cynical, “I thought you were ‘dating’ him?”  
“You’re talking about personal matters son,” says the man from the fishing chair, “We’re here to discuss business. Important business. So shut up, and listen.”  
“What I don’t understand,” Tony says before anyone else has time to derail the conversation from his main point of concern, “Is what I have to do with that? If it’s a Gods’ problem, who brought me into this and why? ‘Cause honestly I’d have preferred to stay out of that fucking mess!”  
“His name is Hermes,” says Fishing Seat’s neighbor, the golden suit one. “He is from our Pantheon, but none of us like him very much… except maybe you, Ares?”  
“Oh, shut up,” the scarred man in a Kevlar vest answers from Fishing Seat’s left. “He robbed you, too.”  
“Well at least in my case it wasn’t so pathetic!”  
“Enough!” Fishing Seat interrupts –and boy, Tony needs to revise his myth if his life’s going to be so filled with divinities from everywhere. “Enough, Nephews, now is neither the time nor the place for old quarrels. We are here to hinder Hermes’ plan, nothing else.”  
“And what, exactly, is his plan?” Tony asks.  
“Please don’t say ‘destroy the world’,” Spiderman sighs.  
“Of course not,” Bastet says. “None of us has ever considered destroying the world!” She looks at Loki then, and amends: “Well. Not the mortal world anyway.”  
“Because it would kill you,” Tony says –Clint shoots him a disbelieving look, apparently unable to accept Tony’s knowledge of their hosts.  
  
To be honest, Tony is ready to admit the whole thing is pretty surreal, but considering his brain is apparently wired to handle green rage monsters and Norse gods better than daily life, he doesn’t find this all that difficult to assimilate. It’s just another kind of science, and he knows his way around _that_.  
  
“Which is why any attempt at actually destroying this planet is frowned upon to say the least,” the man in the wheels chair points out. “Why do you think old Poseidon there killed his old man and the titans?”  
“Brother,” Poseidon corrects, “My brother killed our father, _I_ was trapped in his _stomach_!”  
“Ow,” Spiderman mutters in Tony’s ear, “touchy topic.”  
“Details,” the other man dismisses. “Nobody cares about you anymore.”  
“Says the one who had to be made up with the remnants of a trinity!” the scarred man butts in.  
  
Tony sees Sigyn and Thor’s lady friend facepalm, and Loki looks like he’s battling a migraine, fingers massaging his temples. Obviously, this isn’t a new discussion, and Tony guesses councils between different pantheons must be rare if they’re always like that.  
  
“Actually,” Coyote smirks in his ear, “this one is going pretty well so far.”  
“Wonderful,” Tony mutters, just as Wheels Guy is confronting Kevlar Boy:  
“Don’t play coy with me Ares! I will not be insulted by an idiot like you! Don’t you think I don’t know about the way you egged your followers on mine! It’s you I owe that to!”  
“That was his Roman phase!” The black woman says, skull necklace jiggling, “You can’t blame him for what the Romans turned him into!”  
“Can we please not go over that again?” The Asgardian lady groans, and Loki’s second boy nods.  
“The Lady Sif is right, it’s not like—”  
“Oh shut up boy!” Golden Costume says. “It’s your fault we’re all here anyway!”  
“I suggest you watch your words, Apollo.”  
  
Bastet’s voice is rougher, lower, and her features have darkened noticeably. It’s like someone took her face and decided to go over the lines again, adding a lot of shadow and sharpening the teeth. Her dress is slowly turning red from the bottom, like fabric seeping blood, and suddenly the table falls silent as she continues:  
  
“Hermes tried to steal Sleipnir from his stables when he was but a colt. If you need to blame someone for his subsequent resentment toward the Norse pantheon, blame Loki for not letting his child be stolen from him, but do so at your own risk, for I do not look very kindly on those who wish harm on children.”  
“Uh…” Tony dares after a short pause, “I thought Thor said the guy who did this –Hermes- I thought he said it was a friend of yours?”  
“We thought he was,” Anansi confirms, “but obviously, he lied on that.”  
“How do you lie to the God of Lies?” Spiderman asks, and Loki groans.  
“We will come back to that later on,” he says, taking the reins of the reunion once more. “For now, I believe we haven’t answered all of Mr. stark’s question yet.”  
“Right,” Tony approves, surprised that he’s been so easily distracted –the other Gods seem to remember his question, too, but they manifest more annoyance than interest. “Why would Hermes want anything to do with me? I’m just a mortal.”  
“Because,” Loki says, “I’m not the only one who can travel in time –ask Kali here, you will quickly understand that I was not the only one to purchase this gift from her.” The woman with the skull necklace nods, and Loki continues: “When I took you in the past to meet Coyote and Anansi, they told us about it –Hermes, and the Loki of that time. That means that when I came to your time, I knew to look for you, but so did Hermes, and as much as I resent him, I cannot pretend to forget his mind. Hermes was never truly interested in you, Tony,” the God continues as their eyes meet for the first time since Tony’s last date with Lorna, “but he wanted something only you possessed.”  
  
Silence falls onto the room once more, and Tony takes a deep breath not to fidget under the gaze of two dozen or so deities looking at him with expectant looks.  
  
“And what is that?” He asks, glad to find out he can still keep his voice steady. “What do I have that a God could need to enslave the planet?”  
“Not enslave,” Coyote corrects, “conquer. And I think you know exactly what we’re talking about.”  
“Or perhaps,” Anansi says as he straightens up, the chip in his hand, “you would prefer the word ‘who’.”  
  
Tony watches, paralyzed with worry as Anansi extends his hand, the chip visible to everyone in his upturned palm.  
His hand –it’s the right one, the one with the ruby ring- starts glowing red, whimsy strings of light curling around the chip in curvy forms, and Tony’s hands curl around the edge of the table, white with pressure. Loki raises a hand too, and his trademark green and gold magic joins Anansi’s. Then Coyote adds his own ochre signature, and then all the others.  
The web of lights is now so dense that Tony has trouble seeing the chip in the middle. They grow and grow in abstract shape Tony can almost recognize, until Spiderman mutters something about a baby—and yes, there it is. Tony can see the child’s arm, its head as it grows, bypasses teenage years and young adulthood to settle on the body of a man of medium built with sandy blonde hair and beige-ish iridescent skin, the mark of all its creator shining through him at his every move.  
  
“Hermes is not an idiot. He knows about propaganda, and this is who he wanted,” Loki says. “The only ‘person’ in the world who was able to access nearly the whole content and users of internet in less than a minute.”  
  
Tony stares as the creature turns to him, completely unashamed by its naked, smooth crotch, and nods.  
  
“Good morning, sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, the song for this chapter will be posted [here](http://fanfanwrites.tumblr.com/tagged/Fic%3A-SOS-Ecrits-Avec-De-L%27Air) asap : )


	16. J'accuse mes frères

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some things are explained, and a decision is reached.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title inspired by the song _J'accuse mon père_ , from Mozart l'Opéra Rock

Jarvis' hair keeps shining for a moment, and Tony can't quite take his eyes off him, no matter how weird the idea sounds to his own ears. Jarvis, in Tony's imagination, has always been blue - the blinding, almost white light that later became the arc reactor's color. The AI was never supposed to get a body but, should Tony have given him one, it would have been blue.  
Tony thinks part of the reason why Jarvis wasn't supposed to have a body was because he needed the reminder that an AI is not, in fact, a person. Lately though, he's come to realize that a good part of that was so people would find it harder to befriend him. Deep down, Tony has always known he wanted his robots to like nobody but him, and he doesn't need a potentially-bugged therapist to tell him where that comes from.  
  
"'Tis great news to know that you are alive and well master Jarvis," Thor says."When all of this is done, we shall hold a feast in your honor."  
  
Thor smiles in Tony's direction, and Tony surprises himself by answering in kind, Jarvis' return enough to make him feel like he can do just about anything right now - even live a normal life.  
It feels almost wrong, to feel so good after feeling so bad for so long. It's like Tony's brain has decided to just forget everything that happened in the past months, and Tony can't help but expect the other shoe to drop. It's not the first time that happens to him. He's had times like that before, when all of a sudden, he felt like none of his old neurosis counted anymore. It's unexpected and surprising and the first thing that crosses Tony's mind is that he tried to die five months ago - he shouldn't feel that good.  
The idea, to be frank, is almost enough to send him back into one of those downward spirals that Tony has always hated, but this train of thoughts is interrupted when Clint clears his throat:  
  
"Okay," he says, "can someone please dress the computer before Stark pops a boner?"  
  
Loki's sons snort, schoolboys discovering their first naughty magazines, while their sister tries to hide her blush behind her dignified attitude. Nevertheless, Coyote clicks his fingers and a halo of ochre light surrounds Jarvis, then melts into an all-leather ensemble of boots, pants and jacket sitting on his bare chest. Jarvis looks down at it with a neutral gaze, mimicking the attitude of someone who simply doesn't know what to make of their new clothes... Considering how life-savy Jarvis used to be, Tony finds his gaze sort of heartbreaking.  
He knew, of course, that Jarvis would lose all his data aside from the personality software, but the reminder isn't any less painful.  
  
"You could have given him a shirt," Anansi says with a roll of eyes, "not everybody can be an exhibitionist."  
"Spoilsport," Coyote protests when Loki clicks his fingers.  
  
He sobers down, however, when Jarvis frowns at his brand new Iron Man shirt. Tony notices the look Coyote shares with Loki, an almost unnoticeable raise of eyebrows, but he decides not to read too much in that -it’s probably a mistake that’s going come bite him in the ass at some point, but still. Tony has other things to think about.  
  
“Take a seat, Jarvis,” Anansi says as a new office chair appears between Tony and Coyote.  
  
Jarvis nods and takes an unsteady step to the edge of the table, before he falls flat on his face and onto the ground, Loki’s kids giggling from the other side of the table. Tony is on his feet in seconds, uncaring that he’s going to what is technically a robot’s rescue. Jarvis is his, damnit, he just got him back, he’s not letting him break again.  
  
“Thank you, Sir,” the A.I. says once he is properly seated.  
  
The clothes he was given are a tad too wide on him - he’s pretty skinny and narrow shouldered, the leather jacket and t-shirt look like they’re better suited to someone of Loki’s build, who is lithe but all in all a little above average as far as shoulders width is concerned - but Jarvis doesn’t seem to mind as he sits, and Tony surprises himself by recognizing his own slouch in Jarvis’ pose.  
He sits down next to the A.I, trying not to stare too obviously lest Clint makes another quip about his sexuality - Tony loves his bots, Jarvis in particular, but not like that, thank you very much.  
  
“Okay,” he says once he’s gotten some grip over his jaw, “all that is fine and dandy, but there are still things you need to explain. I mean, how on earth do you lie to the God of Lies?”  
“Oh, it’s rather simple,” Loki shrugs. “You only need to say the truth.”  
“Of course,” Spiderman says on Tony’s side, making a show of slapping his own forehead, “You lie by not lying. So simple.”  
“It really is though,” the man with the Wheel chair says, "you are thinking in terms of absolute truth here, but Loki's godhood pertains to the distinction between active lying and every other options."  
"In other words," Loki's first kid says, "My father can only detect people who are willingly saying something that they know is not the truth."  
"And since Hermes cannot do that," Apollo concludes, “it leaves Loki as vulnerable to him as everyone else."  
“All of a sudden you power doesn’t sound all that interesting anymore,” Spiderman says, and Tony can hear the pout under his hood.  
“Actually,” Jarvis says on his right - and okay, yes, it is possible that Tony starts a little at hearing his voice because hey, it’s been way too long without him - “it shows for a remarkably advanced understanding of the notion of relative truth, especially for someone who was created in a time when most of our philosophical concepts were ages away from their creation.”  
“We evolve with time,” Thor says. “Toutatis and Bastet here are proofs of it. As human beliefs change, so do we... my brother’s powers used to be very different.”  
“Okay,” Clint says, and Tony silently thanks him for steering the conversation back on track, "But why would your so called friend lie to you?”  
“He never accepted my children,” Loki sighs.  
“He thinks we’re monsters,” his son adds. “Granted, most of our pantheon thinks so as well, but that’s the way we’ve all been created. In Hermes’ case it’s more... personal.”  
  
There is an awkward pose at that, as the various deities present in the room trade uncomfortable looks, and if they weren’t dealing with gods, Tony would think they’re trying to decide who gets to tell mom about their latest bad idea... To be honest, the fact that Sigyn and Thor’s girl friend seem to be doing rock-paper-scissor does nothing to alleviate the impression.  
Eventually, it’s Sif who decides to speak:  
  
“The problem here is that there are... certain things we cannot interfere with. I understand you are aware that we did not always possess free will?”  
“Yeah,” Tony agrees, then he turns to the two other humans: “Basically they’re kind of ruled by belief. If everybody believes they’re going to get married to a certain someone, then they will, whether they plan for it or not.”  
“You make it sound a lot simpler than it is,” Sif says, “but that is indeed the gist of it. The point is, what was written in the scriptures will happen. Sometimes there are differences, especially in the case of trickster gods,” - she pauses as Loki, Coyote and Anansi give a slight bow - “because most people are more or less conscious that anything written about them could be a lie, and also because as belief fades, we get more leeway as to how to bring things about. The point is, part of the reason why we all have a problem with Loki is because the Edda was written this way.”  
“The other part being that he’s a little shit,” Clint smirks, reclining in his chair.  
“There’s that, too,” another of Thor’s friend agrees, but he sobers down as soon as he notices the darkness of Thor’s eyes.  
“So,” Jarvis asks, getting the conversation back on track again, “what you are saying is that you were made to hate Loki, but Hermes hates him of his own volition?”  
“Hermes doesn’t hate Loki,” Coyote corrects, “he hates his kids, and the fact that they’re supposed to bring the end of the world with them.”  
“Honestly,” the Skull lady says, “We would be lying if we said we are not worried about this possibility.”  
“Yes, but none of you tried to destroy my children until now,” Loki states. “And none of us would have been foolish enough to associate with the three faced God before.”  
“Alright,” Tony protests, raising his hands in the air, “Who the fuck is that? It’s not the first time you guys mention it. Is he like, the ‘One God’ or something?”  
“Yes,” Sigyn nods, rubbing at her temples, “except there are three worldwide cults worshipping him, aren’t there?”  
“And you can’t have three all-powerful Gods,” Tony understands. “That’s why you said he’s nuts!”  
  
Now that he thinks of it, it’s so obvious he can’t help but let out an incredulous laugh at his own stupidity. Of course that one’s going to be a nutjob. It’s not even his fault or his followers, really -Tony would bet his suit every single deity in the room has had their own lot of batshit insane followers over time, it just comes with the job. you’re a god, people are going to do crazy shit in your name, simple as that.  
But this guy, this three-faced dude... he’s got three major cults dedicated to him. That’s like having three different personalities warring to take the wheel... and that’s without even counting the differences within those cults. Just in Christianism, there are at least three big churches, and inside those you have guys as different as Steve and Romney worshipping at the same fucking altar but in two very different ways... yeah, Tony’s pretty sure with influences like that, he wouldn’t be a pretty sight to see.  
  
“No wonder you don’t like him,” he says once his laughter has calmed down.  
“It’s not that we don’t like him,” Toutatis corrects, “only that he can’t be reasoned with in this state. We can never know which part of him is going to have the power at any given moment. We do what we can to compensate for his outbursts, but his followers are numerous and full of conviction. We only get limited amounts of belief, and not in a direct way either. We do not resent him, but we also know trusting him or negotiating with him is not something we can afford to do so long as so many of your people worship him with such strength.”  
“Okay so what,” Clint asks, “are we talking Loki levels of crazy here?”  
  
Tony sees Loki’s kids stiffen again, and he wishes he could just kick Clint under the table. The archer has good reasons to be hostile, sure, and he wishes he could remember that all the time, but right now he’s just hindering things, and Tony... yeah. that’s not the perfect moment to do that. Clint can be as aggressive as he wants after they’ve taken that son of a bitch down, not before.  
Clint isn’t the only one who wants revenge anymore.  
  
“Actually we’re talking about something much worse,” Loki corrects once the wolf by his side has stopped growling -Tony can see his knuckles have turned an unhealthy shade of white where they grip the black fur. “I was lashing out, and the Tesseract took most of my inhibitions down, which is really not a good combination, but at least I was alone in my own head. I was spreading chaos, yes, but there was still some form of order to it. The three-faced god has no control over his own actions. Hermes has deluded himself into thinking he could cater his power but that is a foolish plan -not even I, at the height of my madness, would have thought myself capable of such a thing. In your vernacular, Hermes has bitten off more than he can chew.”  
“In other words,” Spiderman sums up, “you guys are neck deep in his shit.”  
“Unfortunately, so are you,” Anansi remarks. “Hermes wants to erase the possibility of Ragnarok happening, and in order to do that, he needs to get rid of Loki, as in making sure people forget him entirely. Only he cannot do that while the lot of us are alive, meaning that he needs to erase us as well.”  
“He will try to use acculturation methods against you,” Jarvis states, voice as even as ever -Tony still has trouble believing what he sees and hears today. “Trying to uproot human beliefs and erase your very existence.”  
“Exactly,” Coyote nods. “Some of us are here because we are actually in good terms with Loki but for the majority of us it’s also personal. Once you’ve been through that kind of things once, you don’t really want to go through it again. Kali here is the only one who still has an active cult. I’ve been regaining followers in the past decades, thanks to the natives going back to their roots, and Anansi isn’t too bad off either, considering, but for most of us, we’ve been reduced to scraps of imagination... I mean, Poseidon here at least has the Percy Jackson thing going on, but all Toutatis has is a comic book in France, and even that isn’t as good as it used to be.”  
“I’m just in it to go down with a bang,” the god shrugs. “the general idea remains the same anyway, you know. You can’t do acculturation on free people. That’s not how it works. Free humans, they have contacts, they integrate, sometimes they assimilate, but you can’t just erase the memory of a free people, not entirely.”  
“Long story short,” Clint groans, “if this guy wants his plan to work, he’s got to put us all into slavery.”  
“We heard you’re not too fond of that,” Sif shrugs. “are you going to help us or not?”  
“Help you to do what?” Clint retorts, “Go to war against the most powerful being in the whole universe with a bunch of gods on a diet, a kid in spandex, and archer and Iron Man on suicide watch?”  
“I wouldn’t have put it like that,” Bastet says, regal in her thin dress, “but that is the general idea.”  
“Yeah,” Clint says, looking for all the world like he’s given up understanding anything about his life, “it’ll be fun.”  
“After all,” Spiderman quips in, “Dying is the worst that can happen, right?”  
“Raise your hand if you can think of worse than that,” Hel deadpans and, really, Tony can’t not raise his hand.  
  
It shouldn’t even come as a surprise to anyone, really, that there are things in his life that make dying sound pretty good in comparison. It’s not even about ‘just’ the depression - if anything can ever be about ‘just’ something that eats at your life until you barely remember what smiling feels like.  
This one is about how he panics when he’s stuck in the suit and Jarvis isn’t there with him, or about the way his heart races every time he gets the smallest electric shock. It’s about the fact that he can’t stand the thought of doing speleology ever again, and at least half the scars Sigyn’s apple juice erased. What makes him raise his hand, really, is torture, both the physical and psychological kind, and to be honest there’s as much Obadiah as there are batshit terrorists supporting his hand when he raises it.  
  
The worst thing though, worse than realizing that almost everyone raised their hand is that Loki’s kids raised their hands too. The oldest looks like he’s fifteen, tops, and he’s still rising his hand, his little sister is rising her hand like they’ve already gone through that. Like they’ve already been so in pain they’ve wished they were dead and meant it.  
  
Tony takes a breath as he lowers his hand alongside the others, and he knows from the surprised slant of Clint’s mouth that the archer knows exactly what he is going to say.  
  
“You’ll have to find me a gun or something,” he declares. “I want in.”  
  
He sort of expected someone to protest, to tell him it’s not reasonable - after all he is a non-powered human being away from his special armor, but the only response he gets is a grin spreading on Loki’s face.  
  
“I was hoping you’d say that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Critiques and review are always welcome, here or on [Tumblr](http://fanfanwrites.tumblr.com/ask) <3


	17. Quand il faut y aller...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which planning is difficult, and nobody exactly like each other, but an agreement is reached anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I didn't think I'd be able to upload this before 2013 for technical reasons, but then here it is, and just before Christmas too! I hope you enjoy reading it. <3

Coyote’s face spreads into a grin of his own then, the kind that means shit is about to go down, and Tony can almost hear the ghost of a fear he doesn’t feel telling him to back up now. He ignores it and listen to the Trickster’s voice deepen as he says:  
  
“Go on Loki, tell us about your no doubt brilliant plan.”  
“We need power,” Loki says without wasting time. “We need power, and leverage, and we need Hermes and his allies to lose theirs as well.”  
“Especially his allies,” Sif mutters, but Kali shakes her head:  
“I wouldn’t dismiss Hermes entirely. He doesn’t have much followers these days, much like the rest of us, but his presence in mortal literature is strong. You shouldn’t underestimate him.”  
“I don’t intend to,” Loki confirms as he leans forward in his chair, hands splayed over the wooden table to assert his position -Tony doesn’t know what kind of ruler he would have been, but he does look regal enough to be one. “We can’t go against him in these conditions, let alone Three Face.”  
“Then what do you propose we do?” Hogun says, “Destroy Greece?”  
“Hogun.”  
  
Thor’s face is tight with discomfort but -and given Loki’s expression, that might be new- reproach as well. For a split second the brothers look at each other and when Loki looks away, his eyes seem a little bit brighter.  
  
“What we do,” he says without missing a bit, “is almost exactly what Hermes intended to do.”  
“We launch a PR campaign,” Tony exclaims as footsteps shuffle behind him again, “Of course!”  
“Yes,” Anansi approves, “it’s a good option, especially now that we have Jarvis with us, but there is a problem.”  
“Nobody is going to listen to you,” Sigyn completes. “Mortals only know you as an evil God willing to do anything to spread chaos, if too many of them see you....”  
“That will not happen,” Hel states firmly. “Father is not evil.”  
“No but the mortals could make him if they saw him now,” Sleipnir remarks, a hand coming to rest on his sister’s shoulder, and the wolf whines on Loki’s lap.  
“That means we need someone to talk in his place,” Apollo says as Loki pats his youngest, “preferably someone the mortals know well.”  
“Alright but who?” Spiderman asks, making Clint frown deeper, “It’s not like we can steal Obama away.”  
“Your president wouldn’t do it anyway,” Toutatis remarks, scratching his beard, “I don’t know what kind of a leader he is, but if we want to run a campaign on a God, we need a God to represent us.”  
“Or someone who sounds like a God,” Ares amends without looking up from where he is picking his nails with a hunting knife.  
“So” Thor says with a tentative smile toward Loki, “We are going to extract the Captain of America.”  
“If we can,” Loki corrects.  
“Steve sounds more than Godly enough,” Clint remarks, frown still firmly in place. “You can’t get much godlier than that.”  
“Yeah, we guessed that,” Coyote snorts. “Even since Europeans started to sail out of their lands, this side of the world it’s all about the big blonde and bulky type.”  
“You can visit me anytime you get tired of it,” Kali says. “Asia is a bit better in that respect.”  
“Thank you,” Coyote answers, “I’ll take you up on that.”  
“Coyote,” Anansi intervenes in a tone of voice that reminds Tony of Rhodey, “the point, please?”  
“The point,” Loki tells him, leaning on his elbows now, “is that Captain America is not our priority. Hermes has set up numerous protections around his lair, we will need to strike swiftly if we want this mission to have one chance of succeeding.”  
“So what,” Clint asks, “You don’t think we’re good enough to get Steve out? We managed to beat you before.”  
“But your team was complete then,” Loki remarks, “And undivided.”  
“My brother is right,” Thor approves, “We cannot rely entirely on Steve rogers in our endeavor. He believes Tony to be manipulated, doesn’t he?” He waits until Tony nods, then concludes: “He may refuse to help us yet.”  
“Well if you guys are here to try and convince him,” Tony answers, forcing himself to keep his hands on the table rather than wring his fingers together, “It should help, right?”  
“We won’t be inside the compound with you,” Loki says as he shakes his head. “Hermes has put a ward around it preventing other Gods to enter it without invitation. He made it too low the first time around, which is how Bastet and the others could access the roof, but he will have raised the shield since then. I doubt we will be able to use the same tactics.”  
“It would have been better if we could have gotten the lot of you out all at once,” Sif sighs, but we didn’t have the necessary information, and Thor left before we could even join him.”  
“Tony’s life was in danger,” Thor says with a look at Loki, whose face is as neutral as possible. “We needed to act swiftly.”  
“Okay,” Tony says, not willing to expand on that particular topic, “So if not Steve then that means we’re going for Bruce, right? I mean, he’s the next most trusted Avenger... er. Man. In this team. I don’t think many people know it’s him under all the green.”  
“Well that’s good,” Spiderman says, “because this way the Green isn’t going to be a problem.”  
“Precisely,” Loki agrees. “Moreover, we know for a fact that there are more common points between Banner and Stark than there are between Rogers and him, which means Banner may be easier to convince.”  
“That,” Thor adds, “and if we are to believe Barton, Banner is being tortured as we speak. Freeing him would be a good help, and it would make him more amenable to our project.”  
“One stones, two birds,” Clint nods and Tony feels his stomach clench.  
  
He feels less than comfortable with the idea of using Bruce’ situation to convince him to join their cause... he does think Hermes needs to be stopped. And let’s be honest, he wants him to be stopped as well, but he doesn’t want to put it above his friend’s well being.  
Sigyn must sense that, though, as she turns to him and says:  
  
“Our priority is to get him out. I’m not going to tell you we’re not hoping he’ll agree to help us, but we will get him out regardless.”  
  
Tony nods, hoping against hope that they’ll find Bruce in a not-too-terrible state -both in mind and in soul. Still, he wishes they could be there right now, wishes Bruce didn’t have to go through that.  
He’s not sure whether he’s more disgusted or shocked to discover he barely even thought about him during all his time here and that... he wonders what it says about him, that he can all but forget one of his best friends is being tortured.  
  
It’s probably not pretty.  
  
“The three of you will be the ones going in,” Loki says once the room is back in order, “And Sleipnir will go with you.”  
“I thought you said Gods couldn’t go in?” Jarvis asks, and Sleipnir seems to bristle.  
“I’m a Mythical Creature, actually, not a God.”  
“Not that we haven’t experienced the more joyous sides of divinity,” his brother remarks, but they both quiet down when Sigyn frowns at them.  
“So we’re basing our attack on semantics,” Clint sighs.  
“Yes,” Sif shrugs, “But considering our whole life is based on semantics, you shouldn’t be too worried. We are all well practiced in that game, some better than most.”  
“It’s us,” Coyote stage-whispers in Tony’s direction, “The Tricksters, we’re the ones with more practice.”  
“Who would have guessed,” Jarvis deadpans, and Tony stifles a snort.  
  
It feels like his AI is reverting back to his usual self and that, no matter what, is always going to make him feel a tiny bit better.  
  
“Sleipnir won’t look like me during the operation,” Loki says, “which is certainly going to help placate your friends’ distrust.”  
“But he won’t look like me either,” Jormungandr quips, “because my face isn’t the one you want for that job.”  
“Really?” Tony asks, “Why?”  
“I’m big, blue-ish green and scaly,” Jormungandr shrugs as Loki glares at Tony, “it could have played in our favor with the green man, but somehow I highly doubt it.”  
“Alright,” Clint nods, sounding a lot more resigned than he did at the beginning of this council, “so the three of us are supposed to get Banner and then get him out.”  
“Basically, yes,” Loki answers. “While you are inside, we will make sure to draw as many of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s men out--”  
“To kill them?” Clint asks, more for the show than anything else, “Like you killed Coulson?”  
“No,” Apollo counters, “We’re going to put them in a pocket out of time. They won’t even realize they’ve missed anything.”  
“Until them come back,” Clint counters.  
“Would you prefer we actually killed them?” Kali asks. “This is the best we could come up with. We will carry enchanted weapons, when we use them it’ll look like they die and send them away instead. I’m using up a lot of energy just to maintain that pocket so show a little more gratitude boy.”  
“Clint,” Tony warns when the archer goes to speak again, “Seriously, now is not the time.”  
“Right,” the other says, pout at the ready,  “I forgot. Don’t annoy the guys who killed Coulson.”  
“Depending on which brother you associate them with,” Tony counters, “they can be those who helped save the world.”  
“Are you on their side?” Clint asks, making Tony’s hands clench into fists, because they shouldn’t have to have this conversation, Clint should know--  
“He is on Banner’s side,” Sigyn says, voice firm, and Tony feels like a child facing his mom after a bad prank. “And so are you. Whatever grief you have with my husband or any of us can wait until your friend is out of danger.”  
“Your hu--” Sygin glares, causing Clint to fall silent, but he still turns toward Tony and mouths ‘married?’ with the most exaggerated disbelieving face Tony has ever seen.  
"If we could go back to the point of this reunion?” Loki asks.  
  
People nod with varying degrees of enthusiasm, some of them as interested in their personal wars as they are in Bruce’s safety... Tony tells himself it’s better for them to put both things on the same level rather than relegate Bruce to the back of their mind, but it doesn’t really help him calm down.  
Loki explains the rest of the plan, which sounds fairly simple. While Tony, Clint, Spiderman and Sleipnir get in to try and bust Bruce out -and, if possible, convince Steve to follow them- the others will spread the attack out to make it look like they’re actually trying to go against Hermes by force. According to Thor, there is a very -very- slim chance of them actually succeeding, but they’re not exactly counting on it and so Tony isn’t, either.  
Hel is bringing her army into this, apparently, and the others keep talking about powering up, making sure they have all their strength, which could mean they need a good night’s sleep if it weren’t for the way they say it and the fact that they are gods. They probably don’t need to sleep or anything.  
  
“Above all,” Loki concludes, “they must not get to Jarvis, which is why he will stay here with Sigyn. You will be in charge of supervising the operations and coordinating the movements -Sigyn will help you with that, don’t worry. I would have liked for Hogun or Anansi to stay with you but we are going to need all the striking force we have.”  
“So we’re leaving them unprotected?” Spiderman asks.  
  
There’s no animosity in his voice, but the disbelief is clear, and the table turns to him with ‘are you stupid’ faces everywhere, which makes tony guess there’s something more there. They are all more-than-centennial beings, after all, the fact that they left this crater in the plan is probably not just an error. There has to be a plot twist... right?  
  
“First of all,” Loki says, “Fenrir will be with them so they won’t be defenseless.”  
  
Clint barely has time to frown before the wolf bares its--his? It’s probably his- teeth, and Tony is forcefully reminded of a tale he heard not too long ago about a wolf that decimated a hundred men or so hours after his birth. His sigh of relief surprises him, but Hel gives him a a smile for it, which is probably not a bad thing.  
  
“Secondly,” Loki continues, “This is Jormungandr’s lair.”  
“I’m... not sure I get it?” Spiderman says. “I mean I’m guessing there’s something more to it than a bunch of big tunnels?”  
“This is Norse territory,” Thor explains. “It is a place inherently attached to the myths that have been written and told about us. Only we can access it easily, all others must be invited in.”  
“And that goes for the Big Boss too?” Tony asks. “Like, are you sure he’s not going to be too strong for the barriers to hold?”  
“Absolutely certain,” Poseidon confirms. “Their resistance has been proved many a time, don’t worry about that.”  
“Alright,” Tony sighs, “Alright. My God, I can’t believe we’re actually doing this.”  
“Yeah, well,” Anansi shrugs, “Neither can I. Upfront attack isn’t really my thing, not even for distraction purpose, and I’d really rather not be doing this... but there are times when you need to make a choice, and I made mine. We all did.”  
  
Tony nods, understanding all too well. He’s had his share of choices to make in the past as well, and he knows how important they can be... still, he would rather be anywhere but here right now. Anywhere but at the brink of yet another potentially-world-ending battle, yet another crazed maniac, yet another brush up with death, because that’s how his luck goes.  
  
If he comes back, of course, it’ll be different. He’ll be excited and alive and blown up by the proof of his own existence, he know that, but for now... for now he’s living the bad part. The waiting and planning and fearing. He’d rather go in headfirst and without giving himself time to think... but then, that wouldn’t be very useful to anyone right now.  
  
“I wish Pepper was there,” he grunts. Jarvis’ hand comes to rest on his wrist, cool and a little thicker than Tony would have expected.  
“Allow me to doubt that,” he says, expression of concern so close to reality Tony can’t help turn his hand up and squeeze the AI’s biceps.  
  
It’s true, after all. He wishes he could have Pepper’s organizational skills but he’s fucking glad he didn’t bring her into this, glad she’s not physically at risk... not that he knows, at least.  
  
“We will get Banner out” Loki says, making Tony wonder if he is the only one who heard a promise in his voice, and then Hermes will pay.”  
  
Behind him, Tony hears the pitter-patter of feather-light footsteps, and he wonders if the room seems darker because of Loki’s tricks or simply because he cannot help feeling slightly afraid about what will come tomorrow.


	18. Tu me fais tourner la tête

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a conversation held with more than just words, and Tony isn't sure if it's real or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song for this chapter is _Mon Manège à moi c'est toi_ by Edith Piaf.

"How does that feel?" Ares asks as he finishes adjusting the straps of Tony's Kevlar vest, "Not too tight I hope?"  
"Nope," Tony says, moving his arms to test it out, "perfect. I'm surprised you'd give me Stark Tech though."  
  
He finishes putting his gun together and makes sure it is secured in his holster while Ares puts an ammunition belt around his waist.  
  
"Like most Divinities," the God says, "I tend to work with the best at what I do. Believe it or not, you're still one of the best."  
"I always knew Hammer Tech was a bunch of morons," Tony snorts, followed in kind by Ares.  
"I get the feeling you always knew the rest of the world was a bunch of morons."  
  
Tony wonders if it always feels that hard, to hear people tell you things you don't want to hear. He's not entirely surprised it felt easier being on the other side of that kind of conversation.  
  
"I changed," he says, sounding more defensive than he intended.  
"You're changing," Clint corrects from where he is sorting through his arrows, "there's a big difference."  
"I'm considerate now," Tony insists.  
"Oh, like you were with Steve?"  
  
Usually, Tony is the kind of person who has something ready to answer questions like that. Usually he doesn't really care what people think: it's not like it changes his life or anything and, let's be real, money can round a lot of sharp angles.  
Come to think of it, Tony isn't even certain he ever had a relationship where the other person was his equal. Sure, some acted like they were, but Pepper is his employee, Rhodey depends--depended on him for his job... the list goes on. There aren't many people who could be considered Tony's equal, true, but now that he thinks of it, he wonders how different his life would have been if he'd had more relationships where power dynamics weren't so unbalanced.  
  
It's a weird realization to have all of a sudden, and Tony is going to use that as an excuse for the fact that the only thing he can think of saying now is:  
  
"I'm depressed!"  
"And that makes it alright to hurt people's feeling because?" Clint retorts. "Look, we all know Steve can be uptight and close-minded sometimes, but seriously what did you expect? He was raised in the thirties! For a dude with that background he's not that bad."  
"I...."  
"Look," Clint cuts before Tony can figure out what he wants to say, "I get you're hurting. I can't say I understand why or how but feeling shitty about yourself? Yeah, I know how that goes. Just because you're hurting doesn't mean it's open season on Grandpa... And before you shoot at him again, maybe you should ask yourself if you really have a problem with Steve, or if it's still yourself you're yelling at."  
  
Anger flares in Tony's chest at that: what right does Clint think he has of telling him how to deal with his problems? What does he know of what's happening in Tony's life, uh? Nothing. Clint knows nothing, and yet he still give advice? Ha! Let him deal with that kind of things for just a minute, and he'll speak differently!  
  
"Oh that's rich," Tony spits, "coming from Mr. Let's-bash-on-Loki!"  
"He manipulated me into killing innocents!" Clint hisses, stabbing at Tony's chest with his finger, "he killed more than a hundred people in a week, his antics have sent countless others to the hospital or worse! I have valid reasons not to trust Loki as far as I can throw him; what has Steve done to you aside from existing?"  
  
Tony feels his shoulders tense, his chest puff, and he's about to answer Clint's accusation with all the strength he can when a heavy hand settles on his shoulder.  
  
"I'm a God of War," Ares says, looking pained, "Make me keep peace between you one more time and I'll use one of you to knock the other out, got it?"  
  
Clint huffs, looking as angry as Tony feels, but he doesn't try to argue, choosing to rip his shoulder of of Ares' grip and leave instead.  
Tony deflates as soon as Clint is out of his sight, drained of all his energy by this not-quite-fight. Of course he knew he wasn't always nice to people, but he has reasons damnit! What does Clint think anyway? That Steve never did anything annoying or vexing? Bah, he doesn't get it is all. Tony doesn't work the same way.  
(And yet, he has a point about Loki. What if he has a point about Steve, too?)  
  
"Better out in the open," Ares says, patting Tony's shoulder with enough strength to bruise, "at least now both of you are going to chew on that."  
  
"Yeah," Tony sighs, "guess you're right."  
"I'm stupid," Ares says with a crooked smile, "it's how I was written and there's no denying it. But even a slow thinker like me can learn from his mistakes so, see? Your case is far from hopeless."  
  
Tony snorts, amused but also encouraged by the God's words.  
  
"That's better," Ares smiles. "Now off you go! Sigyn probably has apple juice waiting for you."  
  
Normally, Tony doesn't take well to being sent around like a kid, he never did and Obadiah's betrayal didn't help with that. But there's something about the Gods that makes them feel ancient enough to do that perfectly naturally. It's like they were made to be parental figures of sort - which, Tony figures, it's probably what they're supposed to be, at least in part.  
(He wonders if believing in a God gives the same faint feeling of safety and direction he gets from talking to them. Maybe he should have kept praying after his mother died.)  
  
Tony follows Ares' suggestion and goes back through the corridors toward Sigyn's infirmary, but he stops when he reaches the council room and realizes Loki is still occupying it.  
His profile is as chiseled as Tony remembers it, the green of his eyes made more intense by the flickering light of torches dancing in them. The sight of him makes Tony's breath catch in his throat and his heart beat a little faster... he wishes he didn't know why he reacts like that, wants to run away and never get out of his hiding place again. Tony wants to go back to being five and thinking if he goes deep enough in his wardrobe his problems won't find their way out of it.  
  
He wants things to be easy again but he's beginning to realize there may not be such thing as easy where he's concerned, especially not where Loki is involved.  
  
"I'm surprised you would seek my company," Loki says when Tony finally steps into the room. "You left me with the distinct impression you had said everything that needed to be said."  
"Yeah," Tony grimaces as he thinks back on their last conversation, "well I guess I was wrong on that count."  
  
Loki's gaze when it meets Tony's look cautious, calculating, and Tony wonders if he was always this wary or if he had to learn the hard way not to trust people too much. One more thing the two of them may or may not have in common, Tony guesses.  
He steps up to the God and sits on the table; close enough for his foreleg to almost brush Loki's knee.  
  
"I panicked," Tony says, eyes strained on his own hands, "I was... they were torturing me. The last time it happened... I found out later on that the man I thought of as a father was the one responsible for it. I guess it felt a little too similar."  
"Except I am not a father figure to you," Loki remarks, surprisingly calm. "Am I?"  
"I have no idea what you are to me!" Tony says, wondering if it makes Loki's lying senses tingle. "I knew what Lorna was, there was no doubt about it. I don't know what to make of you."  
"Of course you do," Loki scoffs with a disdainful frown, "only you're afraid of doing it."  
"Oh really?" Tony challenges, bending forward until his leg touches Loki's knee, "And why do you think I would be afraid?"  
  
It's probably risky, baiting Loki like that when Tony knows the answer probably won't please him, but for some reason he knows it won't be the same as having Clint tell him what's wrong in his behavior.  
Apparently, unsolicited advice is a lot harder to take.  
  
"You know very well what to make of me. I am Lorna and Loki... All of this is me. Only you're afraid to admit it because if you do that means letting go of that fantasy you built! You convinced yourself Lorna would be easy to deal with, that there would be no question or wake up call, and when you realized it wasn't the case you found it easier to blame me than call yourself a fool again!"  
"Yeah well it's not like you did anything to dispel the illusion again!" Tony retorts, hands balling into fists, "if you'd made it clear from the beginning I--"  
"Do not blame me for your failings!" Loki shouts, hands slapping over table as he rises to his feet, "don't you dare do that! I am not responsible for your self-deluding tendencies and you have no right to pretend to the contrary, do you hear?"  
  
He looks pale and wide-eyed, as if afraid, and the sight of him now makes Tony cringe inside, guilt twisting in his guts for no reason he can name.  
  
"I was a fool," Loki spits, eyes turned toward his hands, glowing with I un-shed magic, "thinking you would be different and deal with who I am rather than who you want me to be." His fingers tighten into fists, green flames leaking through them, making Tony's stomach drop as he says: "You can't accept the good sides of me and refuse the others. Yes, I can take you to places you'd never dream to reach. I can create things out of thin air and make you live through battles of realms long gone; I can change my appearance and take you to Narnia, Middle Earth or Neverland... But all of this is only a part of me. I mothered children whose looks terrified generations of children. I spilled more blood than you can imagine, and my main function is to disrupt things as much as possible. If you are willing to live with the fact that I can speak in your mind and travel in your dreams, then you must also accept that I created cancer and that I can kill without remorse if it serves me well."  
"You... you created cancer?" Tony says, incredulous.  
  
  
Loki looks as if he's been slapped, and he rolls his eyes before he turns on his heels, hands leaving burn marks on the table. Tony doesn't spare more than a millisecond to mentally punch himself in the face, the. Rises to his feet and grabs Loki's wrist:  
  
"Wait!" He says, surprised at the urgency he feels, "Wait. I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say."  
"Very stupid indeed," Loki answers coldly.  
"I'm just... I'm really not used to that," Tony says, forcing the words past the lump in his throat and the insane impulse to look away, "Usually the things I have trouble dealing with, I can just get them away from me. I've always lived with good people." He snorts without humor as he thinks of Obadiah and corrects himself: "Good or bad. I've never met someone who walks the line before."  
"Except in your mirror," Loki remarks, still tense but not quite as biting as before.  
"Maybe," Tony admits. "But then, I've never known how to deal with myself either. My point is, this is all really new to me okay? I try. I promise I do. But I screw up a lot as well I mean, you should know that by now right? I keep screwing u--"  
  
Tony's sentence is cut short when Loki bends forward and brings their mouths together, lips and teeth grasping for some kind of anchor, for something familiar.  
It feels different from kissing Lorna. There are more angles, more strength also, and Tony is forcibly reminded he has never been with a man before.  
There are similarities though. Of course, the curve of Loki's waist is different, and his chest is all smooth planes and angles now, but as Tony threads his fingers into Loki's hair, it feels exactly like brushing the back of Lorna's neck. When Loki moves his lips,Tony recognizes the little scars around his mouth, like puncture points at the edge of his lips, and when he sighs into the kiss, the God's shoulders slump a little, just like Lorna's used to.  
  
It feels familiar and foreign all at once, and Tony doesn't quite know what to make of it, doesn't know if he's ready to follow through with what he started... But then Loki's hands are on his waist, and the god is straddling Tony's leg, and when Loki's thigh brushes his cock Tony doesn't hesitate before he spreads his leg apart and lets Loki shift closer to him.  
Loki's tunic feels a lot thinner than Tony expected as he reaches down to tug the fabric upward and out of the way, panting into Loki's mouth when his hands meet faintly scarred skin.  
Loki's tongue slips into Tony's mouth as the god explores his shoulders, his arms, his wrists. It's not quite tender, it's not quite urgent, but there's a passion there that makes Tony shiver when he recognizes Lorna in the movements, even though they are bolder than they used to.  
He shifts his head, kisses Loki's eyes in turn as their cocks brush through the fabric of their pants, pleasure coursing through Tony's spine when they find a satisfying angle, Loki's balls rubbing against his thigh in an almost desperate manner.  
  
Tony tries to lift his hips, uses his left leg to pull Loki closer  as he kisses the god's throat, enjoying the feel of his hands in his hair, on his neck, the patch of skin just above his belt.  
Tony’s vest vanishes, and Loki's hands reach for his shirt, making the genius freeze and block Loki's wrist with the heartbeat of a terrified rabbit.  
  
Loki pauses, then takes his hands out of Tony's shirt and onto his cheeks, bringing their foreheads together as he sighs.  
  
"I'm not going to hurt you," he says, "not like that."  
  
Tony releases a breath he didn't know he was holding and reaches up to kiss Loki's lips again, slipping his tongue inside Loki's mouth to catch the elusive taste of something he can't help but label as magic, sharp and spicy like smoke on his tongue.  
Their hips are moving again, looking for friction in an increasingly desperate way, and soon Tony is panting again, nose buried in the crook of Loki's neck, hands gripping at the god's hair until, at last, heat pools in his loins and his body tenses as he reaches his climax and comes in his pants, breath ragged as he slumps on Loki's shoulder.  
  
He can feel that Loki is still hard and he reaches down to try and bring him off and over the edge, but Loki stops his move, firm but not aggressive, and he smiles again:  
  
"Go get ready," he says softly,  "You'll need it."  
  
The look in his eyes makes Tony want to hold him closer, but before he can put his arms around Loki's waist, the god gives him a peck on the lips and vanishes in a flash of green light.  
  
Tony looks at the empty room, takes in the clean state of his clothes and wonders how much of what he just lived was real.


	19. J'ai pas le temps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony tries to be the adult he never had in his youth, and someone doesn't want them to bust Bruce out of S.H.I.E.L.D's custody.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I'm really, really sorry it took me so ridiculously long to update this fic, I promise I'll do my best to be quicker from now on >"I haven't got the time".

The morning after, Tony wakes up two hours earlier than he’s supposed to, having grabbed all of four hours of restless sleep between anxious bouts of insomnia. He’s fairly convinced something stuffed his brain with cotton before crawling in his mouth to die there, and his arms itch with the memory of alcohol cravings.

Around him, the room is dark, with barely the silvery glow of a full moon’s night washing them all in grey hues, magical lights mimicking what little memories Tony has of his very few nights in the desert… somehow, the moon doesn’t seem that much of a friend here either.

 

The bedroom he shares with the other two humans is silent, half empty, and he doesn’t feel surprised when he finds Spiderman sitting on the balcony, hideous fishes swimming over the kid’s head as he sits there cross-legged, shoulders slumped by worry.

Distantly, Tony remembers being five, maybe six, and sitting on his bed with tears in his throat because he’d screwed something up again –maybe he’d failed to make Howard smile, maybe he’d failed to behave like a normal kid, what does he know? He doesn’t like to dwell on that part of his life anyway. What he does remember with astonishing clarity is the distinct absence of a father all this time, and the awkward conversation of a mother who tried, but who really wasn’t made for the job of parent either.

It’s like seeing his own childhood, really, except this time Tony is not in the position of the kid anymore… and yes, okay, he’s not the boy’s father or anything of the sort, but he still feels responsible for him, and the thought that he may fail this conversation as completely as his mother used to despite her best intention… He wipes his palms on his trousers and clears his throat out.

**  
**

“Couldn’t sleep?”

**  
**

The boy isn’t even wearing a mask. All Tony would need to do to know what Spiderman looks like would be to bend down and look around his mop of brown hair, but he doesn’t. Instead, he waits for the red spandex to be back in place –Spiderman went to bed with it on his head- and then the now-familiar muffled voice comes out:

**  
**

“I don’t need much anyway. I guess I just didn’t want to waste my potential last night on earth, you know?” He shrugs, probably aiming for nonchalant but honestly, it comes off as scared more than anything.

 

Honestly, Tony doesn’t feel much better about their situation.

Sure, they’ve worked with worse odds and come out on top, but they’re not soldiers. They’re used to fighting on their own -yes, even now that Tony is a part of the Avengers. He’s not a soldier. He doesn’t mind putting his life on the line, but he hates the idea that someone might die for something he should have been able to solve on his own. What’s the use of being a genius superhero if you can’t even keep others away from the fight, after all?

On the ground, Spiderman has gathered his knees around his chest, and his shoulders have slumped forward. He’s a kid, Tony realizes, nothing more... and yet, if offered the possibility of skipping the fight, he probably wouldn’t take it.

 

“Have you got a will?” He asks after a moment of silence.

“Everything goes to Pepper,” Tony answers in a quiet, certain tone. “Well, there’s a few stuff for other people, and some that I want destroyed, but al the rest is for her. After all she’s done for me it’s the least I can do.”

 

The boy in front of him nods with the slow movement of someone who’s only half-listening, the other half of their brain focused on their own thoughts and problem, and Tony wonders if Spiderman will be able to handle all of this. If any of them is going to come out of this clusterfuck with a minimum amount of bruising.

 

“If I die, all my aunt’s going to get is an empty room and a bunch of spare costumes with bullet holes in it.”

 

Tony watches Spiderman toy with the hem of his hood, then take it off entirely, sighing deep enough that Tony is reminded of his own youth -or the few hours of it he didn’t spend wasted, at any rate.

 

“I told myself the mask was because I didn’t want people to get hurt,” the boy says, “Even though I was looking for revenge and I knew it was safer for me to hide who I was, too. But the thing is, no matter what I do they always seem to get hurt anyway. I can’t not hurt them so long as I’m in these thighs.” He shrugs then slumps, defeated. “I should probably just burn it all and stop.”

 

Tony wants to answer that.

He sort of wants to be reassuring, and there’s a part of him that wants to tell the boy next to him that everything will be fine, that all he has to do is stop being Spiderman and things will go better, but then... well. It’s not that simple.

So in the end, Tony sighs and sits down next to his fellow hero, careful to keep his eyes fixed in front of himself so he won’t see the boy’s face.

 

“You know,” he says with the kind of voice people use on frightened kittens, “A few weeks back, I had a huge fight with Captain America. Well, I had a fight with everyone, really, but mostly him. It got pretty nasty, let me tell you, and honestly I don’t think I ever hurt anyone that bad before... but that has nothing to do with being Iron Man. That happened because....” Tony brings his knees against his chest, mirroring Spiderman’s position, and soldiers on: “Because I’m seven kinds of screwed up, really. I was in therapy, and we were about to start considering medication.”

 

Beside Tony, there is nothing left of the super hero, swallowed away by the sight of a seventeen-years-old with unruly brown hair and soft hazel eyes, a faint scar still visible at the corner of his mouth where his lip must have split at some point. He looks almost scared, and how can Tony blame him? Of all the things he's fought in his life, not even Loki's alien invasion managed to be scarier than the demons in his head. At least when you can put a bullet through it, you can always clutch a gun to feel safer.

Putting a bullet in your own head is a whole other story.

**  
**

"I'm not trying to tell you that's what's waiting for you," Tony tells the boy, "It's probably not. But what happened that day, it didn't happen because of Iron Man. Quite the reverse, you know, I think Iron Man happened because of that. All this to say... It's not the costume that hurts people, it's the person inside it. Not 'cause you're a bad person but because it's what people do. They misinterpret and they misunderstand and in the end, they hurt each other even when they're trying not to. Sometimes especially then. The powers we have, our knowledge, we could all have sat on it. We didn't have to go in the streets to fight crime or madmen. But we did. For revenge, for closure, for forgiveness... Whatever the reason we're all risking our lives on a regular basis even when it destroys our private lives." Tony chuckles when he realizes where his monologue is leading him, but it's not really a joyous thing. "I've been living with superheroes for a while now, and I guess the one thing we have in common is that who we are in costume trumps everything, even our personal life. It's the one thing that makes us get up in the morning, and you can't just set that aside like a dirty shirt."

**  
**

It's funny how, sometimes, you don't even realize you've been questioning something until you've made your mind about it. Tony didn't even know he was thinking about retiring, but now here he is, wondering how he could even think he could retire.

It should have been obvious from the moment Pepper failed to keep him in the hospital after Obadiah died.

**  
**

Next to him, Spiderman's eyes have gone wide, mouth slightly slacking with surprise before he whistles:

 

"You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?"

"More than I thought," Tony agrees.

"I guess you're not wrong. I don't know what I'd be without Spiderman, but I bet it wouldn't be very good." He pauses, eyes rising to the sea and the mass of fishes still swimming toward the faked moonlight. "My name's Peter Parker. And if anything happens to me... I'd appreciate it if you could take care of my aunt May. If you don't mind."

 

Tony shakes his head, because at this point it’s the least he can do.

He’s not sure who got more out of this conversation, whether it’s him or Peter who needed it the most but, frankly, he doesn’t really care -he feels better for all of this anyway.

 

“I’d rather it stayed between us though,” Peter adds after a pause. “Just in case.”

“I’ll be a tomb,” Tony promises, and hopes this line won’t prove to be some piss-poor instance of foreshadowing.

 

**{ooo}**

 

It’s strange, because Tony never thought of Jarvis as anything but his creation, his personal butler AI.

Which is probably ridiculous because Jarvis was given a -literally- shiny body by a bunch of Gods and Tony should have suspected something was at work there, if only because he’s a self appointed genius, and even though he doesn’t want to think of whatever exists between Loki and him right now.

(Possibly not ever, but that one is an entire point entirely.)

 

Then again, he’s not sure he could have braced himself for that.

 

“Why do you have four eyes?”

 

They’re not ugly or anything, honestly, and their arc reactor-blue color makes them stand out against the steel gray of his body, flashing lines of electric blue ones and zeros mirroring the runes on Loki’s true face. Still, it’s two more eyes than Tony ever expected to see on Jarvis, and it makes him feel grateful for the office chair beneath him.

 

“Apparently,” Jarvis answers, “I am the god of the Internet.”

“The web,” Peter sighs behind Tony. “Makes sense.”

 

Tony wants to disagree, but it does kind of make sense when you think about it.

Still, he wonders if there will be others afterward, a whole pantheon of Gods and Goddesses for DVD players, Netflix and Wikipedia -please, don’t let there be a goddess of Wikipedia, ever.

Not that it would be surprising if a Goddess like that happened, but there is enough weird in the world without her, and nobody needs a deity with her personality or knowledge rewritten every five minutes, thank you very much.

 

“Do the data lines come from Loki?” Tony asks after a while, “The pattern’s really hard to miss.”

“Sometimes,” Loki says as he enters the room, “some aspects of the Catalyzer is transmitted to the Catalyzed Deity. The runes I bear are lies, changing as they are spoken, and there is another God where I come from who bears the weight of truths. The Internet contains both, which makes it logical for Jarvis to share the feature. Now if we are done with the trivia, it is time we made sure we won’t lose contact during the operations.”

 

Peter mutters something about earpieces being a pain under the hood, but Tony ignores him in favor of observing the rest of their little assembly. They’re all back in the council room and geared up for war. Tony with the Kevlar vest and guns he got from Ares, Kali with blue skin and several added arms, Hel with an adult’s body and a lot more blue on her skin than she showed yesterday. Coyote and Anansi are, of course, back to their animal forms, and Poseidon and his crews have changed into Gladiators-like outfits that are, all things considered, among the most normal things in Tony’s life right now.

The weapons a worryingly primitive –bows, spears, swords… some of them are even going in empty-handed like Jörmungandr or, in Sleipnir’s case, with nothing more than a staff, which makes Tony deeply uncomfotable.

 

Still, the display of varying culture, colors and appearances is impressive enough that Tony has to pause in order to take it all in, make sure he didn’t miss anything, and commit as much of it as he can into his memory. It’s a rare sight, he’s sure, deities of varying pantheons getting together behind the same man, the same cause. From what Tony has seen until now, they seem to be the type to fight among themselves more than together… but then, Tony may be wrong.

 

Jarvis clicks his fingers and earpieces appear in the blue-white light of his magic, promptly put on by everyone present -including those with unusually-shaped ears. Tony’s feels perfectly adjusted and secure though, and he suspects Jarvis made sure that was the case for everyone… he tries not think too much about his AI showing intent for the first time ever –it’s a topic for another day. If he survives to see it.

 

(He doesn’t let himself wonder if Jarvis would miss him, either.)

 

“Alright,” Poseidon says once they are all set up and the earpieces have been tested, “I believe it is time to form the ranks.”

 

Loki nods and everybody divides into their assigned team, Tony sticking close to Clint, Peter and Sleipnir. Loki doesn’t look at him even one second, not even when he comes to give his son a clap on the shoulder that soon turns into a brief but heartfelt hug... hell, even Thor gets more eye contact with Loki than Tony does, and considering their relationship, that’s saying something!

**  
**

It only takes a few moments before everyone leaves in a flurry of lights in various shades of ochre, red, green and blue, until it’s only Tony’s team, Jarvis and Sigyn in the room, with Fenrir sticking to her calves like his life depends on it.

 

“Here,” Sigyn tells Tony as she puts a bottle in his hands, “It’s for your friend. I have a feeling he’ll need it when you find him.”

“I don’t suppose you could convince Blacky to take a gun with him on top of that, could you?”

 

It’s not even that Tony doesn’t trust Sleipnir’s fighting skills, it’s just that going into battle with only a staff is pretty much a suicide run in his opinion, even when you have fingers hard as rock and are over seven feet tall.

 

“I don’t need a gun!” Sleipnir protests, white teeth contrasting sharply with a skin that is the same black as Loki’s hair. “I fight better with my staff.”

“And it’s a pretty staff,” Tony tells him just a little bit too close to sarcasm, “And the metal points are a nice addition, but I’d feel safer if you could--”

 

Tony doesn’t have time to finish his sentence before a flash of green light surrounds them, and when he opens his eyes, he’s standing in a corridor that looks a lot like those he had to cross when he escaped from S.H.I.E.L.D’s custody. It’s faceless and empty and Tony doesn’t like it one bit, especially not with the faint noises of battle coming from outside. He draws his gun just as Clint readies his bow -another sore point on Tony’s mind- and the tell-tale fizzle of communication establishing fills their ears.

 

“On your left,” Sigyn’s voice says, there’s a weakness in the wall. You can go through there to join the next bit more easily.”

“Have you taken care of the cameras?” Peter asks, which makes Sleipnir click his tongue.

“She’s not stupid, of course she did. Move over so I can open the way.”

 

Peter obeys, standing next to Tony while Clint puts himself on the other side of Sleipnir, bow ready to fire... if he didn’t have the reflexes he does, Tony would honestly feel a lot more stressed than he already does.

Sleipnir takes a few steps back from the wall, runs toward it and, in a movie-like move, plants his staff in the ground and uses it as a leverage to kick the wall with both feet, smashing a hole through it as easily as a fist in paper.

 

“Alright,” Peter admit when they cross the opening, “You don’t need a gun.”

“I can’t hear anyone,” Sleipnir signals, head turning to hear better.

 

Tony, who can only measure what’s going on with parties-damaged ears and average eyesight, struggles not to clutch his gun harder than necessary, knowing it wouldn’t be a good thing for his aim -it gets off when he’s stressed, and now is not the time to let himself do that.

Still, he has no choice but to trust the other’s instincts and keep himself at a maximum level of alert, brain working on overdrive to anticipate as much as humanly possible while Sigyn guides them to the cell blocks.

 

Bruce is trapped in the largest one, his back to the exit, and Sleipnir stops dead in his track as soon as they get withing ten paces of it. Tony kneels against the glass, punching the window to try and get Bruce’s attention, but doesn’t get any response beyond Peter’s slight jump.

 

“I don’t think it’s a good time to play the kid in the aquarium,” he says from the wall he’s sticking to, “There’s something coming toward us.”

“I can hear it too,” Sleipnir says, voice strained. “Hurry, Stark!”

 

In the earpieces, Tony can hear Jarvis’ shout something and Sigyn swear like a sailor, but he can’t bring himself to care about the meaning of their words when Bruce is right there, barely a few steps away, and yet impossible to reach.

 

“Damnit Stark your friend reeks of blood, get him out!” Sleipnir hisses.

 

Tony jerks out of his own worry and, looking up, realizes there is an electronic lock. This is something he knows. This is something he can do, something he can fix. He can do that for Bruce, at the very least. He takes a deep breath and get to work.

The lock looks more complex than average, and the sapphire-colored greek letters engraved around it make Tony suspect there is magic at work, which is really not something he feels like dealing with.

(He should probably have anticipated it though, and it takes all his self control not to hit his head on the glass. It won’t help Bruce, and Bruce is the priority right now.)

 

“It’s going to take hours to open this!”

“No it won’t. You’re not going to.”

 

In Tony’s ears, Sigyn and Jarvis’ voices have turned to half-panicked hisses, a string of instruction Tony doesn’t understand filling his left ear as he turns away from the cell and finds Steve standing in the hallway, looking absolutely set on preventing them from busting Bruce out.

 

 _Well_ , Tony thinks as his three teammates step in front of him to buy him some time, _So much for getting him out with us._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and critique are always appreciated, here or [on Tumblr](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com).


	20. L'Aigle Noir

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> C'est alors que je l'ai reconnu/  
>  _It is then I recognized him_  
>  Surgissant du passé, il m'était revenu.  
>  _Arising from the past, he came back to me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title for this chapter was inspired by Barbara's song _L'Aigle Noir_. You can listen to it [](http://terresdebrumestories.tumblr.com/tagged/Fic%3A-Sos-Ecrits-Avec-De-L%27Air>here</a>.)

Steve almost looks like one of his posters with his set jaw and shield ready to fly.... Tony thinks, a bit stupidly, that all he’s lacking is a halo of heroic backlight and then he’ll have won the fight already. Isn’t that the rule? Captain America wins all of his fight, and that’s about it.

It is, sadly, not the first time Tony finds himself in this position, with him trying to do what he thinks is the best thing to do and Steve strongly disagreeing -Hell, it’s not even the first time the shield comes into play! And let’s be honest here, it’s probably not the last time that happens either, but to be frank Tony is getting more than a little tired of this configuration.

He’s got enough of fighting with the people he wants to be friends with.

  


“Focus on the lock, Stark,” Sleipnir tells him as he swings his staff in a way that’s more menacing than any piece of wood has any right to be, “Banner doesn’t have much time.”

  


Tony breathes in, feeling like he’s just breached the surface after nearly drowning, and forces himself to turn back to the glass wall. _Bruce. He has to help Bruce._ There’s no one else to do it, so that falls onto him, and he’s trying to determine where to start on the magic-enhanced electronics when Steve’s shield flies right past his head, putting a dent in the wall of Bruce’s cage.

  


“Banner is too unstable to be released now,” Steve hisses, sounding like he’s clinging to the line for all he’s worth, “he needs to be confined, for everyone’s safety!”

“What he really needs,” Peter corrects from the wall he’s still sticking to, “is a doctor, and soon.”

  


Steve turns toward him, body still half-angled toward Clint and Sleipnir, but his back is to Tony, probably because of anatomical impediments rather than any forgetfulness on his part. Tony takes a deep breath and turns back to the lock, then crouches and sets his gun on his lap before he starts pulling on the plastic casing of the lock.

  


“Did Stark and Barton tell you that?” Steve asks with abnormal sarcasm in his voice, “They’re Loki’s puppets, kid.”

“Maybe they are,” Peter answers, “but my senses aren’t and I can smell the blood for myself. The dude’s bleeding out in there.”

  


Tony risks a glance at Peter, who moved several inches to the right, and wonders what the kid has in mind: if Steve throws his shield at him now it’s only going to bounce and--Tony almost hits his forehead in frustration: of _course_ Peter’s counting on the shield bouncing! And when it does, at this angle, it’s going to come right back at where it started, namely the dent in the wall!

Tony bites back a proud grin and turns back to the lock -better safe than sorry after all, and if he can disable it, retrieving Bruce will be that much easier. Before he can do anything significant however, several things happen at once.

 

Tony sees Clint move from the corner of his eyes, and Steve lets out a surprised shout, right before his shield comes crashing into the padlock, breaking the line of runes around it. This in turns causes Tony to stumble backwards, barely grabbing his gun in the process, and then yelp in pain when someone takes a hold of his right wrist and twists it behind his back.

Tony sees Peter bouncing around the room, spider web slowly encircling Steve as Sleipnir keeps him too busy to set himself free, and Clint is firing arrows at the corridor.

  


“I won’t be able to keep them out forever!”

  


In his left ear, Sigyn is shouting something Tony doesn’t understand, but it’s the voice in his right that makes his brain stop dead in its track -or maybe it’s the click of a gun safety being removed.

  


“I don’t want to hurt you Stark,” Natasha says, pulling on his arm, “let go of the gun.”

  


Tony’s flesh burns with the motion and he almost wants to curl into it, wants to do everything he can to avoid it but he can’t -not when Bruce is bleeding to his death in a cage much too similar to the one in the helicarrier, not when he’s here because Tony didn’t take him out when he escaped the first time, not when Bruce is the whole point of Tony’s presence here. He wants to yell and surrender but he can’t, and so when Sleipnir slams into the glass wall next to them, Tony makes himself use Natasha’s millisecond of distraction to pull on his arm and pull the trigger of his gun.

 

Miraculously, Natasha’s hand doesn’t clench despite her startled and pained move, but Tony doesn’t really feel better knowing he’s not dead at the moment: when he turns to point his gun at Natasha, there’s a hole in her forearm where there should be flesh, and blood is pouring out of the wound much too quickly for his comfort.

  


“I’m so sorry,” he gasps, “I’m so sorry, I never meant to....”

  


Oh God, what if he shot her artery? What if he came here to save a friend and killed someone who saved his life several times by now? What if Natasha bleeds to death, and what if they can’t even save Bruce, after all?

Tony’s breathing turn labored with fear, and when Natasha crawls to her feet and toward her gun, he doesn’t have time to really readjust his aim before something knocks into his back and sends him smashing against the wall, knocking his head on bulletproof glass.

 

The body above him is unusually heavy, and when he looks at it he sees it’s covered in blue spandex and moving slowly, but it’s Natasha who keeps his attention. She got her gun now, and she’s aiming toward him, and she’s going to--

  


“NATASHA!”

  


There’s a dull thud, and Natasha falls to the ground, revealing Peter with his mask half torn, panting hard. Above Tony, Steve is finally getting back to his feet, but something sends him rolling toward Peter, and then pulls Tony out from under the lock.

Tony watches Peter tear a strip of his costume to tie it around Natasha’s arm while Sleipnir does that thing with his feet again, smashing the glass on his fourth attempt.

  


“Did the bullet come out the other side?” Clint asks, all but stumbling by Tony and Natasha’s sides. His only answer is a shrill:

“I don’t _know_ do I _look_ like I know? I have no idea how to deal with gun wounds! I’m not a doctor!”

  


Peter’s voice trembles with fear and barely-contained panic, a sentiment Tony can only echo, though in his case it mostly shows in the trembling of his hands as he turns to watch Sleipnir coming out of the cage, Bruce carefully balanced on his shoulders.

  


“If you’re quite done,” he says, “we need to get out of here and soon. The arrows kept them out for now but I can hear them coming back... my sister must have sent someone to meet us, we need to find them.”

“And then what?” Tony almost snaps his neck when he turns to face Steve, slowly rising from his place against the opposite wall. “Are you going to bring him to Loki so he can use the Hulk to injure more people?”

“That’s not part of the plan,” Tony protests almost before he can think better of it. “I’m not doing this for Loki’s benefit.”

“Are you sure?” Steve insists, getting to his feet, then indicates the broken room with his hands: “Look around you Tony, it’s madness in here! We’ve never been so hostile toward each others --you just shot Natasha!”

“I didn’t mean to--”

“We’re tearing each others apart,” Steve forces on, “how can this _not_ be Loki’s plan?”

  


Tony wants to answer, he does.

He wants to find something to say to prove he’s made his choices for himself beyond the shadow of a doubt, wants to make Steve understand there are real reasons for him to believe what the Gods he’s met told him. He wants Clint to defend their plan and he wants Peter to not shift his weight so awkwardly, and he wants Sleipnir to stop looking like they’re taking too much time smashing an insect to the ground.

Tony wants all of that and more but all he gets is his heart hammering against his ribcage like a machine gun tearing through the wall of questions he told himself he didn’t have the time for. He gets sweat on his forehead and under his arm, and darkness creeping at the edge of his mind, and then dark blue, almost black fog clouds his vision.

 

For a second, Tony thinks he’s going mad, but then the fog shapes into a human silhouette, one hand creeping behind Steve to run its fingers through his head.

Steve’s eyes brutally roll back in his skull and he falls to the ground like a ragdoll, sapphire-blue sparks shooting out of his hair and into the fog’s hand. Tony tries to look at it... and crawls back against the wall of glass with his throat closing up and warmth spreading between his thighs, feeling like his head is about to explode and cave in all at once.

 

Slowly, like hearing a voice through water, Tony hears the fog say:

  


“Let’s hope this will do the work.”

  


He sees Coulson’s head turn toward him, an eyebrow raised, and then there’s nothing but darkness.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments and critiques are welcome, here or at my tumblr <3


End file.
